Historic Chinese courtyard house fully digitally scanned for preservation using SHINING 3D scanners

Preserving historic architecture in digital form has long required practitioners to choose between coverage and resolution. A project at Shijiazhuang Flower Hall — a traditional Chinese courtyard house covering approximately 745 square meters in Zhejiang province — tested a dual-technology workflow designed to address both demands in a single documentation campaign.

The building, named for the Dongyang wood carvings that cover its beams, brackets, purlins, and eaves friezes, presented two significant challenges.

At the macro level, the full courtyard required fast, accurate spatial mapping across a large footprint. At the micro level, individual carvings — some with relief depths measured in millimeters — required a scanner capable of resolving fine surface geometry in recessed and undercut areas.

Combining SLAM and structured-light capture

To handle the courtyard layout, teams used the OmniSLAM R8+ mobile simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) color 3D laser scanner, which completed a full building survey in approximately 15 minutes at an angular accuracy of 0.005 degrees in leveling and verticality.

For carved surface detail, SHINING 3D‘s EinScan Libre wireless handheld scanner was used in fine-area laser scanning mode. The device operates without an external computer, relying on an onboard NVIDIA processor. In that mode, it delivers accuracy to 0.04 mm with a minimum point spacing of 0.05 mm.

The two datasets — large-scene point cloud from the R8+ and high-resolution mesh from the EinScan Libre — were then merged into a unified model covering the full building down to individual carving strokes.

The resulting model is intended to support restoration planning through virtual simulation, remote academic study of carving techniques and iconography, and public engagement through virtual reality experiences.