Lixel K2 Workflow: What Happens After The Scan?
Part 3 of our Gaussian Splatting series. Part 1: What is Gaussian Splatting and Why Should SketchUp Users Care?· Part 2:From Scan to SketchUp. This one is practical: the scan is done, now what?
What happens immediately after you complete a scan?
When you complete a scan, the data is stored on the scanner itself. Where exactly depends on the model: the Lixel K1 and L2 Pro, to my best knowledge, both use removable micro SD cards. The K2 and the PortalCam, as the newer generation, use internal solid-state storage, which you access with a USB-C cable or stream over the scanner's Wi-Fi connection.
Immediately after the scan, make sure your phone registers with the scanner and confirms that the scan is complete and safely saved to that internal storage. Only then close the project on your phone and turn the scanner off.
Back at the office, reattach the battery, I'd recommend leaving the protective case on, turn the scanner on, and connect it to your computer over USB-C. Here is a quirk worth knowing: on first connection, the computer may register the scanner and show you a folder containing the machine's version number documentation. That is the wrong folder, you're looking at the operational scanner, not the storage. Unplug and re-plug the scanner, and it registers as a USB mass storage device instead. Now you'll see the actual scan data.
From this point you can browse the folders and see everything Lixel stores for the project. Bear in mind: none of these files are to be touched, deleted, or moved. Everything sits in a specific folder for the specific project you've scanned. The easiest and safest way to work is to copy the complete project folder over to your computer, onto the desktop or straight into your company's project folder structure.
Important: do not delete the scan from the scanner yet, even though you've made a copy. The data on the scanner is your original, your first redundancy. We only delete it later, once the scan has been processed and we're happy with the result inside SketchUp, as a Gaussian splat or a point cloud. Until then we want redundancy across three levels:
On the scanner
On the local computer
In cloud backup
And a recommendation before any of this touches a client: do two or three practice projects around the office or at home first. Take that data through the whole chain, scanner to computer to Lixel CyberColor Studio, and learn the folder structure without the responsibility of client data riding on it. Once a client is paying for the scan, it's the wrong moment to be learning the transfer process.
2. How much storage do you need?
A scan uses roughly 1 GB per minute. Your scanning frequency against that number tells you what storage to buy, whether that's the SD card for a K1 or the internal storage option on a newer model.
Our rule of thumb on 512 GB: reserve half for backup files and half for active scanning. That gives you roughly 256 minutes of scanning headroom. Our scans generally run 10 to 40 minutes, so that's five to six full-length scans, enough for two to three days of scanning across a property or estate, with room to keep recent projects on the device as redundancy.
Then, on a weekly basis, we run a simple routine:
Check the memory drives and internal storage
Process the week's scans
Check that those scans are correct
Remove confirmed data from the scanner
File it in the project folder on the office computers
Create the cloud backup
3. Why is file structure so important?
Because the redundancy model only works if the same project folder exists identically in all three places; scanner, computer, cloud. Structure is what lets you trust the chain.
Inside each project, we store raw capture data under a folder called Site, split four ways:
3D scanning data, everything from the Lixel Scanner
360 data, Insta360 capture, photography or videography. We review this by uploading the videos to our company YouTube profile as private videos, visible only to ourselves and the client.
Digital camera data, DSLR, handheld digital camera, and phone photography
Drone data, 360 video or mapping video
For the scan data, naming does the heavy lifting. When a project is exported from the scanner, the folder gets named RAW + project name, so anyone can see at a glance that it's unprocessed data. Processing output goes into a separate Processed subfolder with a further split between a Point Cloud folder and a Gaussian Splat folder.
4. What mistakes can happen when moving files from the scanner to the PC?
Remember what you're dealing with: a very large data repository. At a gigabyte per minute, a long scan is tens of gigabytes moving over one cable.
The failures are mundane and that's exactly why they catch people: a fault in the cable, a loose connection, or the scanner's battery running out mid-transfer. Check that everything is in good working order before you start, and make sure the scanner's battery is fully charged, don't transfer on a low battery.
This is also why the redundancy model matters. Keeping the original on the scanner until the scan is processed and actively in use validates the transfer. If anything corrupted along the way, you find out while the original still exists.
5. What hardware limitations should people understand?
There are two sides to this: the computer that processes the scan, and the scanner itself.
5.1 Processing hardware
You can process locally on a Windows machine with sufficient storage, RAM, and a healthy, beefy graphics card. The GPU and RAM govern most of the process. Everything you record at a gigabyte per minute has to be held in RAM during processing, a 24-minute capture is roughly 24 GB of project files and wants somewhere around 24 GB of RAM to hold it.
My starting point: an i7 or i9 processor with 64 GB of RAM. With the AI farms being built at the moment, RAM pricing has gone through the roof, but 64 GB is the necessary evil of a minimum. On graphics: an NVIDIA 3000-series card would now be considered a little low, although our 3080 Ti with 12 GB does a really decent job. The 4000 and 5000 series is where I'd put my money, that's a card you can use for the next three to five years without swapping it out.
If your machine is older or lower-specced, Lixel CyberColor Studio offers a low-memory mode. It breaks the project into smaller parts so less RAM and GPU are needed at any given moment it works, but it takes a lot of extra time. And if local processing isn't for you at all, Lixel offers an annual-fee cloud processing option: upload your files to their rendering farm and get them back processed, generally faster than a local machine manages.
The reason we still process locally is control. You choose between low- and high-memory use, you set the splat density (how many millions of splats in the scan), and you choose slow, medium, or fast processing. Slow gives the highest photographic quality, that's our default for retail. Fast gives you a quick result when all you need is an overview of how well the scan came out, which matters when you still have the opportunity to rescan an area
Our rhythm: finish all scanning and recording during the day, set processing running in the evening, and review quality the following morning.
5.2 The scanner itself
The K2's defining trait is that it blends two worlds: point cloud accuracy and photographic quality, two data streams in one device. That blend is its biggest advantage — and its limitation, depending on your industry.
A product focused purely on LiDAR gives you more accuracy but no Gaussian splat. A product focused on the splat like the PortalCam, gives you superior photographic quality but less scanning accuracy, and it's better suited to work like virtual movie set recreation for cinematic production.
The K2 sits in between, scanning at an accuracy of roughly 12 to 20 millimetres. For retail, experiential marketing, and shopfitting, that's more than we need. But if someone requires millimetre-accurate scans and I'm thinking specifically of mining and energy, where those accuracies can be required by law you need a different tool. Meanwhile the K2's splat quality is far beyond anything recreated from a 360 camera, and comes very close to the PortalCam
Horses for courses. We scan for shopfitting and general architecture; other industries have other products.
6. What advice would you give someone opening Lixel CyberColor Studio for the first time?
Take it easy. Start with a scan that has no client purpose the parking lot, your home, the office so you can experiment with the software without breaking anything that matters.
Before you dive in: make sure you're on the latest version and your settings are aligned. Register your Lixel profile on their website to unlock everything under the free version, or register your licence if you're using the pro features. Watch a few of Lixel's tutorial videos (and ours) for the first steps — and don't skip the built-in user interface tutorial that triggers on first launch. It's a genuinely good walk through the menus, sub-menus, and processing tools.
Then my main advice: make your first processed scan a five-to-ten-minute capture. A compact dataset like that can be processed several different ways without costing you days — low light versus high contrast, slow versus fast. Process the same dataset under different settings and take note of the variations in quality and processing time. That's how you build the judgment for commercial work: knowing which settings suit which client, and which type of scan.
I hope this gives you enough to decide how to use a Lixel scanner — or whether it suits your business to buy one. For questions about anything discussed here, email us at info@studiojdb.com. For hardware specifications or pricing, contact Chris at BuildingPoint SA: ckeightley@buildingpointsa.com.
Part 2 — From Scan to SketchUp · Next in series: Importing SketchUp Models Into Lixel CyberColor Studio
