3D Laser Scanning

[Aaron Bourgoin]

I saw a presentation yesterday made by a civil engineering / survey firm who showcased work done with a Leica 3D Scanning station. They offered examples of both terrain modeling and structure scanning (interior and exterior)

Has anyone had first hand project experience with this technology?

The presenters claimed to be compatible with Revit and ArchiCAD via R12DXF. The proof would be in the pudding and unfortunately due to client privacy issues they were unable to leave any sample files for evaluation.

I'm a bit skeptical. It just seems that the "point cloud" their instrument creates is not much more than a 3D underlay for a bunch of drafting that they would do with a fee for service.

Any thoughts?

[Anonymous]

Hi Aaron,

Laura Handlers Bimx blog talks often about laser scanning and Revit -

http://bimx.blogspot.com/search/label/Laser%20Scanning

Personally, I know nothing of the process other than it looks interesting!

[MMontgomery]

Hello,

Bump.

My company would like to get a 3D scanning system, but not sure which one to get.

I've got Trimble's 'Realworks' installed and a sample point cloud (1.2GB file!) in which I'm converting to geometry.

The folks at Trimble haven't had any experience going from their point cloud to ArchiCAD. I have had no luck exporting from Realworks into ArchiCAD. Of the file formats Realworks exports to, DXF, DGN, DWG and OBJ are the only ones compatible with AC, and none of them produced a model in ArchiCAD.

Has anyone successfuly converted a point cloud or point cloud based geometry to an importable file that ArchiCAD can use?

[Bricklyne Clarence]

MMontgomery wrote:
Hello,

Bump.

My company would like to get a 3D scanning system, but not sure which one to get.

I've got Trimble's 'Realworks' installed and a sample point cloud (1.2GB file!) in which I'm converting to geometry.

The folks at Trimble haven't had any experience going from their point cloud to ArchiCAD. I have had no luck exporting from Realworks into ArchiCAD. Of the file formats Realworks exports to, DXF, DGN, DWG and OBJ are the only ones compatible with AC, and none of them produced a model in ArchiCAD.

Has anyone successfuly converted a point cloud or point cloud based geometry to an importable file that ArchiCAD can use?

You would probably need an intermediary application or software that plays nice with Point-cloud applications and point-cloud information to get your point-cloud info into ArchiCAD.

The obvious candidate is McNeel's Rhino3D which can not only import point clouds but also has it's own internal inbuilt digitizing or scanning module to scan the model directly into Rhino. Rhino would then convert the scanned information into a coherent (and hopefully water-tight) 3D mesh or model exportable into other software such as ArchiCAD.

On it's own, a point cloud is merely a collection of points in 3D space with nothing more than 3D coordinates for each point. At least that's how a program like ArchiCAD would read them. Hence the need to convert it into a 3D mesh or a solid which can then be read correctly in other programs.

[Mats_Knutsson]

I got scanned lines of a rock side (I don't know if they came from a point cloud or if the scanner did lines directly) that I covered with a surface in Rhino and saved as .3ds and then into ArchiCAD as usual. It worked great in 3D and 2D-sections. This was 2003 or 2004.

/M

[Anonymous]

Firs hand experience here comes:
Point cloud is useless in Archicad and any other software actually. Typically surveyor is converting point clouds into the actual model using specialized software. This ain't cheap though (although way cheaper than 3-5 years ago).
This models can be exported to dwg. Granted Archicad still lacks a proper support of 3D dwg files (importing as object is a joke), you would need to convert it to IFC first.
You can use point cloud in Navisworks where you can somehow get the idea of how the scanned structure looks like.

[Anonymous]

I saw one of these laser scanners in action about a month ago.
www.faroasia.com

it was so good I just about cried 😉 I know what I want for Christmas!

[vfrontiers]

I am shooting from the hip here and have not experience (but a lot of interest)... But if a POINT CLOUD generates an XYZ file, how well will AC14 interpret that directly?

[Anonymous]

vfrontiers wrote:
I am shooting from the hip here and have not experience (but a lot of interest)... But if a POINT CLOUD generates an XYZ file, how well will AC14 interpret that directly?

Assuming you mean the XYZ to mesh function I imagine it would work quite badly if at all. The point clouds tend to be very dense and I suspect the quantity of data would overwhelm the tool and even if it didn't I doubt the result would be of much use.

[Dwight]

Point clouds must be manually analyzed to separate differing materials and connect edges logically. A nightmare.