Stadiums & entertainment
with the details that matter.
Arenas, theatres, convention centres, and production sets. We pair the capture method to the way your team will use the result.
What needs to be
measured first?
Venues combine long-span structure, rigging and catwalk geometry, tight sightline requirements, and no available access during event season. Scanning between events produces the bowl geometry, rigging points, and back-of-house documentation that renovations and productions both need.
Every facility has a different risk surface. We start with access, geometry density, and the decision the capture needs to unlock — then choose between laser scanning, drone mapping, or both.
Talk through a scope- Bowl and seating geometry
- Rigging and catwalks
- Back-of-house
- Broadcast infrastructure
- Theatre fly systems
- Production sets
Capturing a venue between events
Venues combine long-span structure, precise seating geometry, and an operating calendar with almost no gaps in it. The capture order is driven by what is only accessible when the building is dark, because that is a genuinely short list of days.
Bowl and seating geometry
Riser and tread dimensions, row spacing, aisle and vomitory positions, rail heights, and the seating plane as built. Sightline work and seat count verification both depend on this surface, and it is what a bowl renovation is designed against.
Roof structure and rigging steel
Long-span trusses, purlins, catwalks, and the members that loads get hung from, along with existing rigging, lighting, and audio infrastructure. Nothing about this geometry is measurable from the floor with a tape.
Field, floor, and stage
The playing surface or arena floor, its levels and drainage falls, pit and trap positions, stage and fly tower geometry where present, and the transition between floor and bowl.
Concourse and back of house
Concourses, concessions, restrooms, locker and production rooms, media positions, and the service corridors linking them. This is ordinary building capture with unusual congestion and very restricted access hours.
Load-in path and site
The route a truck, a forklift, or a piece of production equipment takes from the dock to the floor: door heights, ramp slopes, turning space, and clearances the whole way. The exterior and site get captured from the air in the same visit.
Dark days, rigging access, and the event calendar
The building's calendar is the schedule and it is not flexible. Between the event itself, the load-out, the turnaround for the next booking, and maintenance, the number of genuinely available days in a season is small, and they get committed early. Capture that needs a lift for rigging steel or catwalk access is harder still, because it competes with every other trade wanting the same equipment on the same dark day.
Access at height is its own planning exercise. Reaching roof structure and rigging points means catwalk access, lifts, or capture from ground positions with clear sightlines, and venue rules on who may work at height and under what supervision govern all of it. Labour arrangements at many venues also determine who operates equipment and moves seating, and those arrangements are worth understanding before a scope is written rather than after a crew arrives with a plan that does not fit them.
More on how this works in practice is on our guide to scanning without a shutdown.
What venue projects need from the capture
Venue deliverables split between the bowl — where a surface is what matters — and the structure, where individual members and connection points are the answer. Very few projects need both at the same depth.
| The decision | What to ask for | Why that one |
|---|---|---|
| Bowl renovation or seating replacement | Seating surface geometry plus plans and sections | Riser, tread, and row geometry as built is what new seating and rail work has to be fabricated against. |
| Sightline study | Measured bowl surface and obstruction geometry | We supply the measured geometry; the sightline criteria and the analysis belong to the venue designer. |
| Rigging and production planning | Point cloud plus modeled structure and rigging points | Production designers need to know where steel actually is before a plot is drawn against a drawing. |
| Back-of-house and concourse work | As-built plans and a Revit model where scoped | Concession and restroom renovations are ordinary building projects in a building nobody has drawn recently. |
Formats and what each one is good for are covered on the deliverables page.
What goes wrong in venues
- Black surfaces everywhere — Theatres, arenas, and production spaces are painted black and lined with acoustic treatment, which absorbs rather than returns the beam. Fly towers, grids, and stage houses need closer setups and more of them than their floor area would ever suggest.
- Seats are not the seating plane — Upholstered seats fold, absorb, and obscure the riser they sit on. The geometry a design needs is the concrete beneath, so a capture aimed at bowl renovation has to be planned to see the structure rather than the furniture on it.
- Rigging captured with an event in it — A capture taken while a show's rigging is up documents a temporary configuration that will be gone within days, with the permanent structure hidden behind it. Rigging surveys belong on a genuinely dark day.
- Load-in route left to the day — A piece of production or plant equipment that fits the destination but not the ramp, the door, or the turn is a familiar failure. The route deserves measurement, and it is the part of the building nobody thinks to include.
What venue operators and production teams ask
How much can you capture on one dark day?
A great deal, if the plan is settled beforehand and access to lifts or catwalks is arranged in advance. What wastes a dark day is deciding on the day — which areas, whose permission, which lift, which escort. A walk-through in advance turns a single day from a partial capture into a complete one.
Can you produce sightline data?
We produce the measured geometry a sightline study runs on: the seating surface as built, rail and barrier positions, and the obstructions in the way. The C-value criteria, the eye-point assumptions, and the analysis itself are the venue designer's work, and they should be, because those choices are design decisions rather than measurements.
Can you document rigging points?
The geometry, yes: where structural members are, where existing rigging attaches, and what the clearances around them are. What a capture cannot tell you is what any of it is rated to carry — that is a structural engineering question about the building's own design and history, and it belongs with a qualified engineer.
Can you scan a theatre without disturbing a production?
Between productions is much better than during one, both for access and for what is visible. During a run, the set occupies the stage and the rig fills the grid, so the permanent geometry the project needs is largely hidden. A changeover week, when the stage is bare, is the window worth waiting for.
Pair TLS interiors with drone exteriors for one coordinate story.
Roof, yard, tanks, structures, and the building envelope can live in the same project handoff when the control is planned upfront.
See existing conditionsMake the invisible
measurable.
Tell us what is inside, outside, and on the line. We will help you scope the capture and the handoff — in New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut.
Request a scan quote