We've already talked through what it means to bring the survey process into a virtual environment with Virtual Surveyor, as Tom Op ‘t Eyndt, Managing Director for Virtual Surveyor, talked through those details with us at Commercial UAV Expo 2018. Much of that insight picks up on what it means to create surveys efficiently from drone data, which is a topic we've discussed in detail by starting with the question about what "traditional" surveyors really do.

To get a better sense of what it means to work in this virtual environment, we asked Tom to provide a showcase of one of the Virtual Surveyor productivity tools. The video below shows how you can go from your drone data to a lightweight CAD model in minutes. Q-Points are the most important points to describe a topography and Virtual Surveyor has an algorithm to extract them. However, they are not perfect and the surveyor only needs to do a small effort by removing the points that are not accurate. When that's done, the surveyor creates a surface very easy and can export that to a format that allows him to read in Civil3D.

To see plenty more videos, check out the tutorial section on the Virtual Surveyor site.