SimActive

SimActive is a photogrammetry software developer based in Montreal, Quebec. Philippe Simard, its CEO, and Louis Simard, its CTO, founded the company in 2003, and SimActive says it now serves thousands of clients in more than 100 countries. Its product is Correlator3D, a desktop mapping suite that processes imagery captured by drones, crewed aircraft and satellites. SimActive describes its aerial triangulation and DSM engines as the first in the industry to run on the GPU.

Correlator3D runs aerial triangulation and produces dense digital surface models, digital terrain models, point clouds, orthomosaics, 3D models and vectorized 3D features. Further tools cover ground control point and tie point editing, DEM editing, NDVI maps, 3D change detection, volume calculation, contour extraction and LiDAR point cloud colorization. On the input side it accepts drones with any camera type, multispectral, multi-camera and oblique imagery, large-format aerial cameras such as UltraCam, DMC, Phase One and ADS, scanned film and historical imagery, and satellite sources including WorldView, GeoEye, SPOT and Pléiades.

Gaussian splatting arrived with Correlator3D version 11, which SimActive released in April 2026. The version 11.0 release notes list four splat additions, generating splat models, viewing them, editing them and merging them, all inside the same application that produces the survey deliverables. Version 11.1, released in June 2026, revamped aerial triangulation and lists no splat changes.

On October 5, 2026, SimActive announced that Correlator3D can publish a Gaussian splat model online directly from the software. A user connects a Cesium account, starts the share from inside Correlator3D, and the splat is published to that account. SimActive's announcement does not name the Correlator3D version that carries the feature.

Correlator3D runs on 64-bit Windows 7, 8, 10 or 11 with at least 12 GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce, Quadro, Tesla or GRID card or an AMD Radeon or FirePro card, and SimActive's version 11 manual states that Gaussian splat generation needs an NVIDIA GPU. SimActive also supports deployment on AWS and Microsoft Azure and sells distributed processing and a scripting API. Standard licences cover drone and aircraft cameras up to 61 MP and are sold as a subscription at 295 USD a month or 2,950 USD a year, or as a permanent licence at 5,900 USD, or 6,400 USD floating, with permanent licences including one year of support and updates. Medium format, large format and satellite editions are priced on request, every standard plan includes all modules, and a free trial is offered.