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?

[vfrontiers]

We recently were asked to map out (topographically) a boulder hillside... Not something I want to do with a stick and transit!... That Leica solution was recommended although we did not end up doing it.... Cheating, eyeballing and faking it turned out easier. (Go figure)...

[Laszlo Nagy]

As far as I know point clouds may contain as much as many-many million points.
I wonder how ArchiCAD would deal with that. My guess is: not well. It is just too much data.

[Dwight]

vfrontiers wrote:
Cheating, eyeballing and faking it turned out easier.

Like marriage. Whodathunkit?

[vfrontiers]

OUCH!

[Anonymous]

Hello there !
I add my stone to the edifice ...
I'm a French user of archicad, last week a person from Faro came to present their fantastic 3d Focus scanner...It was cool.... but...
Since this presentation we try to use cloud points file made with the scanner....try a soft called 3Dreshaper (demo available) which cost the half price of Polyworks (20000euro ) but for now it's quite impossible to easily and quickly extract a 3d model from it.... the faro scan price is around 21000euro.(the 120 meters model, without extra battery the tripod and the additional spheres of placement)....
the guys of polyworks accept to test the file we have done with the scanner last week (3 scans of a street )...
I don't know if their solution is quick and profitable ... the future will say it
i ll give my feedback soon !

(sorry for my English because I didn't practice for a while .... )

[MMontgomery]

I was able to get a point cloud of a manufacturing plant interior from Trimble to work with and tried importing it into ArchiCAD in several ways.

I used a demo of Trimble's Realworks software to convert the point cloud into various formats and used it to create a 3D model to export.

When importing the point cloud as an XYZ file into ArchiCAD, it took several hours and never fully completed, even after leaving it to run overnight. I could see it add many, many hotspots, which were placed in a Doppler radar fashion. It would eventually just stay in spinning cursor mode. I could cancel that and flip into the 3D window and nothing was there. Pretty much what I expected.

The DWG and DGN formats didn't produce anything either, and most disappointing, the 3D model I created in Realworks didn't have an export format that ArchiCAD could import. This may change in the future.

Considering I only tried the one example from one manufacturer, it's possible that Leica, Faro, and others may have an exportable 3d format that ArchiCAD likes. However, my experience was that until a point cloud is able to be imported raw directly into ArchiCAD and converted to walls/slabs/parts within AC, the point cloud and it's related software package would primarily be useful as a reference for pulling dimensions, since you would ultimately be doubling your modeling effort creating a surface model in the point cloud software and then again in ArchiCAD to convert everything to parametric parts.

It definitely has some very nice advantages such as quick and accurate field measuring as well as the ability to refer to the scan for a dimension that was missed, eliminating a trip to the site. But for the price, it still appears to be a bit out of sight for what it offers.

If anyone else has had any success importing from a laser scanning system, I'd be interested in hearing about it.

Thanks!

Mike