Frequently Asked Questions

Drone photography captures a moment in time from fixed angles. Renders show an artist's interpretation of a single view. An Arvello environment is a living, navigable space built on real terrain data, explorable from any angle, updated as the land or project changes (with a subscription).

We are based in Canterbury and work with clients across the South Island and New Zealand wide. Because environments are delivered entirely online, international investors and offshore stakeholders can access them from anywhere. We work primarily in Real Estate, Agriculture and Construction & Infrastructure. But we are open to work with clients that have a need to visualise their assets and operations in a unique way.

No. During your subscription your environment runs on our servers and is delivered to you via pixel streaming. All you need is a device with a good internet connection and a modern web browser.

Your environment runs on a high-performance server and streams to you as live video, responding to your inputs in real time. It means a tablet or a laptop can run something that would otherwise need a workstation costing thousands. No downloads, no installation, no specialist hardware. Send a link to anyone, anywhere, and they see exactly what you see.

Every Arvello engagement begins with a one-off build-out fee to create your environment, scoped to the size and complexity of your land or project. Your first twelve months of hosting are included, so your environment is live and accessible from day one with no subscription required.

From month thirteen, you choose how to continue. A Platform Access subscription keeps your environment live and accessible from any device. A Full Service Partnership keeps us actively involved, maintaining and updating the environment as your asset changes. Or take a clean break with full project file delivery and no ongoing commitment.

The environment is yours from day one. Get in touch for a scoped quote, every project is priced individually.

You keep everything. You receive the complete Unreal Engine 5 project files and all associated assets, yours to use as you see fit.

Two things worth understanding before making that decision.

Running the environment independently requires a capable workstation with a high-performance GPU. The hosted service handles that computing load on our end, which is what lets your team access everything from a phone, tablet or laptop. Without it, you'll need specialist hardware to open and run the environment at the quality it was built for.

The delivered files also represent your environment as it stood at the point hosting ended. Any changes to your land, infrastructure or site conditions after that won't be reflected, so over time the environment will naturally diverge from the current state of your property.

For many clients this is simply the point at which they choose to re-engage. We're always happy to discuss resuming hosting, refreshing an existing environment, or scoping a new build when the time is right.

Usually less than you'd expect. We build from a combination of publicly available terrain and boundary data, and whatever you already have, farm maps, survey data, engineering drawings, site plans or photographs. During scoping we'll tell you exactly what we need and what we can source ourselves. You don't need any specialist data capture to get started.

There are cases in our real estate offering where any existing 3D models of buildings/site models that can be provided to us can greatly speed up the development cycle and in-turn reduce costs.

It depends on the size and complexity of your site. As a guide, a small to medium rural property or a standard development site typically takes 3-6 months from data to delivery. Larger stations, master planned developments and major infrastructure projects run longer and are scoped individually. We'll give you a clear timeline before any work begins.

Yes, that's the point. Your environment is delivered via pixel streaming, meaning anyone you share it with can open it in a normal web browser on a tablet or laptop, from anywhere in the world. Your farm manager in Canterbury, your investor in Auckland and your stakeholder offshore all see the same environment at the same quality, no downloads, no specialist hardware.

BIM (Building Information Modelling) and Arvello serve two different purposes, and they work well together.

BIM is the technical backbone of a construction project. It's a data-rich, dimensionally accurate model built for the people delivering the project, engineers, architects, quantity surveyors and contractors, used for coordination, clash detection, costing and construction. It's precise and essential, but it isn't designed to be understood by anyone without technical training. Open a BIM model and a board member, investor or community stakeholder sees an engineering document, not a clear picture of the project.

That's where Arvello comes in. We take a project and turn it into a high-fidelity, interactive environment that anyone can open and explore, without specialist software. Where BIM communicates data, Arvello communicates understanding. We don't replace your BIM model or your engineering team; we sit alongside them as the visual layer that makes the project genuinely understandable to everyone else who needs to grasp it.

We can also work directly from your existing BIM data. Where good BIM geometry is available, we can use it as a starting point for building your environment, saving time and keeping the visualisation faithful to the real design. And unlike a static render or a pre-recorded flythrough, which show a single fixed interpretation, an Arvello environment lets your stakeholders explore the project themselves, in real time, and stays live and current as the project progresses.

In short: BIM is your source of truth for building the project. Arvello is how everyone else sees and understands it.

That's what our ongoing options are for. Platform Access clients can commission individual updates whenever needed at an agreed rate. Full Service Partnership clients have updates built into a regular cycle, changes to paddocks, infrastructure, construction progress or land use are captured and reflected in the environment as part of the relationship. For active construction projects, we offer update cadences from monthly through to weekly to match the pace of your build.

Yes. We're based in Canterbury and much of our work is across the South Island, but we take on projects throughout New Zealand. Because environments are delivered entirely online, where you are matters far less than what you need, and your stakeholders can access the finished environment from anywhere in the world.

Absolutely. Our Broadacre Project, a fully interactive environment of a working Canterbury property, is available as a live demonstration. Get in touch and we'll send you the link, it's the fastest way to understand what an Arvello environment actually is. Open it on your laptop, explore the property, and you'll know within two minutes whether this is right for your situation.

Our environments are built from real site data, terrain, boundaries, aerial imagery and whatever information you're able to provide, and they're crafted to give a genuine sense of scale, character and context. They're accurate in the way a well-made model of a place is accurate.

What they are not is survey-grade. An Arvello environment is a visual and illustrative representation, an artist's interpretation of your land or project, built for communication and understanding. It is not a technical drawing, a survey, an engineering model or a measurement instrument, and it shouldn't be treated as one.

Any dimensions, areas, distances or spatial relationships shown are indicative. Where precision genuinely matters, that work belongs with a licensed surveyor, engineer or planner, and we'd always point you toward one.

Not as evidence, no. An Arvello environment can be a genuinely useful thing to have in the room during a planning conversation, a community consultation or a stakeholder meeting, because it helps people understand what's being proposed. But it doesn't replace the technical assessments a council, engineer or lawyer will require.

We don't provide, and our environments shouldn't be relied on for, boundary determination, resource consent decisions, structural or engineering decisions, construction setout, legal or contractual measurement, or valuation. Those all require appropriately qualified professionals, and our work sits alongside theirs rather than in place of it.

We build from what we're given. If the plans, boundaries or site information you provide contain errors, those errors will carry through into the environment. We'll flag anything that looks obviously inconsistent, but we're not in a position to verify the accuracy of third-party data, and we can't be responsible for inaccuracies that originate there.

If accuracy is critical to how the environment will be used, it's worth having your data verified before we begin.

Then start with a conversation. Most of our clients arrive with a situation, a property going to market, a development seeking investment, stakeholders who need to understand a site, rather than a specification. We'd rather talk honestly about what's right for your situation than fit you into a package that doesn't quite work. There's no obligation and no sales pressure, just a straightforward discussion about what's possible.