Crowdfunded “Open Roads” LiDAR project

Hey simracing folks.

We want to offer a community-driven project to build real-world open roads (mountain passes, hillclimbs, rally-style tarmac sections) from LiDAR scans and solid 3D reconstruction, then release everything back to the community.

Not a paywalled mod.

If the crowdfunding hits, the result belongs to the backers/community: a playable track for Assetto Corsa (and other moddable sims where possible), plus the cleaned source datasets so anyone can port it to another game or pipeline.

We’re not guessing here: we already work professionally in Unreal / 3D environment production and we know how to turn “millions of points” into a stable, drivable surface. The scan is just the ground truth. The deliverable is a proper road surface built for physics (clean collision mesh) plus a visual mesh, with documentation and exports.

What we want to test is simple: does the community want this enough to fund a first pilot? If yes, we pick a first road together (vote), we scan it, we publish the build + datasets publicly.

On the practical side (and to keep this grounded), here are real rental price anchors we can work around.

For a mobile/SLAM-style LiDAR that can cover long road sections efficiently, rentals we’ve seen are around €400/day (Lixel L2 Pro 16-channel) or €500/day (32-channel).



For ultra-accurate spot scans (corners, hairpins, braking zones) with a terrestrial Leica RTC360, rentals we’ve seen are around €470/day (example France pricing) plus a small daily insurance add-on. 

Some providers advertise from €250/day depending on terms/location. 

A realistic first pilot (example): 10–15 km of mountain road, “Version 1” focused on driving feel and accurate elevation/camber (not a AAA scenery pack).

Hardware rental for 2 days is roughly €800–€1,000 for the SLAM LiDAR alone, then optionally €470–€752 for one or two days of RTC360 spot-detailing if we decide to do premium corners. 

The bigger cost is production time (cleaning, alignment, road rebuild for physics, in-game testing, packaging, documentation). Because we would release everything openly, the crowdfunding goal needs to cover the capture trip + rentals + enough dev time to deliver a legit drivable build.

So for that 10–15 km pilot, we’d likely set a crowdfunding target in the ballpark of €6k–€12k depending on how “finished” you want the first drop (pure driving surface vs extra scenery polish). If it overfunds, we scale the same road: better visuals, more roadside detail, more “premium” rescan zones, extra variants.

If you’re into the idea: reply with (1) your dream road (country + name/area), (2) your minimum acceptable “V1 quality” (physics-first vs visuals), and (3) whether you care most about Assetto Corsa or another sim. If there’s real interest, we’ll post a follow-up with 3 candidate routes, clear milestones, and a transparent deliverables list (playable build + exact dataset package).

TLDR : we scan real mountain roads, ship a playable .

NB q: we cab deliver this with our company, so no scam here we really love doing this type of work for other industry and the pipelines are pretty close, we are also really experienced in both, scanning with all that include (even 3DGS). And game dev.