Architect wants to process the surveyor data received

[claudia_architect]

Hi all,

I'm an architect looking for advice on how to effectively process surveyor data for my design projects. I often receive surveyor deliverables in various formats, including point clouds, CAD files, and aerial imagery. I'm looking for a streamlined approach to organize, analyze, and interpret this data to inform my design decisions.

Which software tools and techniques are most commonly used by architects to process surveyor data? Can anyone recommend specific software packages or workflows that have proven helpful in their practice?

I'm particularly interested in tools that can:

• Clean and organize surveyor data to remove noise, inconsistencies, and outliers.
• Analyze spatial relationships and patterns in the data to identify key features and site constraints.
• Generate accurate 3D models of the site based on surveyor data.
• Integrate surveyor data with other design data, such as CAD drawings and BIM models.

Any insights or recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

[Srinivas]

As far as cleaning and organising your surveyor data is considered, Cloud compare is a great tool to start with https://www.cloudcompare.org/ 

[claudia_architect]

Thank you for pointing me to this tool. How can I get the buildings extracted to work in Archicad?

[Srinivas]

After you clean and organise the surface date in the Cloud Compare, you can export to e57 or XYZ format from Cloud Compare and then import those point clouds into Archicad.   

[claudia_architect]

Hi Srinivas,

thank you. These formats seem to work for the importing pretty well.

Is there a way to convert the individual points into planes or morphs? Or is this a manual process?

Many thanks,

Claudia

[david_skogvold]

Late reply to an old post, but might be useful to someone anyway -

Check out the "Ransac" plugin in CloudCompare, this automatically recognizes primary shapes in your point cloud, but you will need to experiment a little to find parameters that work for each case. Once this is dialed in, it is a surprisingly quick and effective method for extracting planar surfaces like walls or roofs from complex point clouds.

CloudCompare wiki - Ransac Shape Detection plugin