Make the possibility visible

A massing that has not been tested is a drawing. Civexa places a footprint in the buildable area and checks it against the setbacks, the height limit, the slope, the driveway and the parking — and reports the constraint when it does not fit.

Explore your property See the whole platform

The question

Does the programme physically fit this lot, and what has to give if it does not?

The envelope is the analysis

Not an illustration of one

The envelope is solved from the parcel boundary: each edge gets its role and its outward normal, each setback is applied inward along it, and mapped exclusions are subtracted from what remains. The masses drawn in the viewer are the capacity engine's own candidate programmes placed on that solved envelope — the same objects, not a separate picture of them.

Terrain from real elevations

Slope is sampled, not assumed

Ground is built from USGS 3DEP elevation samples: the grade, the relief across the lot and the direction it falls. Where the service returns nothing, the ground stays flat and topography is reported as unknown — no grade is invented, and the slope band distribution is labelled as modelled because five sample points cannot support a slope map.

Access, parking and open space

Drawn as geometry, and tested

A driveway corridor is traced from the frontage to the nearest face of the building and clipped to the parcel and any exclusion; parking stalls are packed at real dimensions and each one tested for containment and for reach from the drive; the residual after building, drive and parking is reported as open space. A shortfall is a named conflict, never a silent zero.

Fire apparatus access is not encoded anywhere in Civexa, so it is reported as an unresolved constraint with the width a reviewer would apply — and nothing is deducted for it.

Fragments count

A lot split in two is still a lot

Where setbacks and exclusions split the buildable land into detached pieces, Civexa searches all of them rather than only the largest, and a building placed on a detached fragment says so — because a detached site is a real caveat, not a detail.

In the report

What the massing section reports

Geometry the engine solved, with the unresolved items separated from the measured ones.

Buildable area9,380 sfderived

Footprint placed1,860 sfderived

Storeys3derived

Screening grade9.2% from USGS 3DEPverified

Driveway corridor12 ft, clearderived

Fire apparatus accessRequires verificationunresolved

Illustrative figures from a real Civexa run. Run your own address for live, code-traced numbers.

What it will not do

The answers Civexa declines to give

A model that always produces a number is a model whose confident answers cannot be told apart from its guesses. These are the cases where Civexa reports a gap instead.

A clearance Civexa cannot source is not assumed. Fire access is reported as unresolved rather than deducted, because assuming a clearance that has not been verified is how a scheme gets designed around a constraint that does not exist.
A mass that does not fit is reported, not shrunk. Where no footprint fits the buildable area, the report names the constraint that stopped it.
Measurements are approximate, never survey. The viewer's dimension and measurement tools are labelled as planning-level throughout, and the projection is stated.
A neighbouring building is not evidence of what you may build. Context geometry is drawn where a caller supplies it and is labelled non-regulatory.

Questions

3D development modeling, in detail

Is this an architectural design?

No. It is a massing study: the volume that fits inside the regulatory and physical envelope. It is meant to start a design conversation from a measured envelope rather than replace one.

Where does the terrain data come from?

USGS 3DEP elevation sampling. Where the service is unreachable, the ground is reported as flat with topography unknown, rather than a slope being inferred.

Can I test a different scenario?

Yes. Scenarios you build live in the viewer, are badged as yours, and are never written back into the engine's own result — so a what-if is never mistaken for a finding.