From the course: Archicad 24 Essential Training

Laser scanning - Archicad Tutorial

From the course: Archicad 24 Essential Training

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Laser scanning

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- [Instructor] Out of the box, ArchiCAD provides some interesting ways to translate information. One of those ways is using a laser scanner and importing point clouds. So if you go into here you can bring in a E57 or an XYZ file, that's a point cloud. And I have already done that, and let me show you what that looks like. So here is a point cloud that I captured with a BLK 360, like a laser scanner. And what I was doing was an as-built of a project. And so, I went through and I scanned the entire building and this is what I came up with after I scanned it, did the registration. And what's really great about this tool, even though laser scanners can be expensive to purchase you can still rent them and they're a little bit more reasonable on a day-to-day or a weekly basis, but they do provide a lot of information that you wouldn't normally be able to capture with a laser measuring device or a tape measure. And so, what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you why I like getting this information. So let me go to my view options and I'm just going to turn on my 3D cut on. And so if I take this cut, bring it down, not too far. A little higher. I finalize that. You can see that I have a lot of information that I've already captured from this project. And so, I can really get down in here and start to assess what it is that I've captured. And this is a really pretty large file. It's about a gig in size and it's a composite scan. So it's made up of about, I would probably say like 15 scans or so. And what this allowed me to do is I was able to spend about two hours or so, or a little bit less, to scan this building. And then I was able to go in here with a wall tool, and I was able to select the actual points of the scan, and quickly make the building based on the skin. And you can see how quickly this can go. So when I was done putting this together and kind of getting the scans or the walls in there, it took me about 45 minutes or so to bring this in and create the building from the scan itself. One thing you have to be aware of, so when you bring this scan in it changes into a LCF file or a container file, and you just have to kind of play around with the display range and you adjust that so you can see more or less of the information that you're trying to see. But all in all for a typical as-built, it could take you anywhere from five to eight hours, depending on how you're working. But with this laser scan I was able to do both the scan and the creation of the building itself, probably in about three hours total, from start to finish from the beginning of the scan, to actually having the building fully modeled. So I recommend if you have the opportunity to start to leverage laser scans in your practice an easy way to do that would be to rent something like the BLK 360 or even one of the more powerful laser scanners from a civil engineering or survey location. And I think you'll, especially if you're doing a lot of tenant improvements you'll find a lot of value in this workflow. So laser scanning it's a great way to get information accurately into your ArchiCAD model, and ArchiCAD works with laser scans pretty efficiently.

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