Never mind the cloud; what about point clouds?

Reader T.N. writes:

I work for a pressure vessel manufacturing company. Often we have to go to the customer's plant with surveying equipment to get dimensions of a tank in a concrete pit, and make repeat trips to double-check everything. I was wondering if you knew of any laser scanners that would be applicable for taking field measurements.

I'm sure the technology is there, but don't know how accurate it is with piping and flanges, versus buildings per your article. I figure we'll have to purchase additional software as well because right now all we got is Bricscad V11.

 
As I understand it, you need three pieces of technology:

1. The scanner
2. Software that imports the scan data (point cloud) into a CAD system
3. Software that converts the point cloud into CAD entities.

The scanners are $30,000 - $70,000 each. Brand names include:

• Topcon
• Leica
•  Leidar
• Z+F

If the price of the hardware is too high, then there are firms that provide scanning services.

These scanners include software for getting data into CAD systems, usually. CAD programs have to be specially written to handle the millions of point generated by the lasers, such as with MicroStation and AutoCAD.

In the case of Bricscad, you would need third-party software to process the point cloud to a 3D surface model, and then bring it into Bricscad. There companies that provide this software:

• Pointools
• Geomagic
• AAT CAPPS Laser Point Cloud
• Kubit

This software tends to be priced in the thousands of dollars.

Comments

[CADkid]

Autocad 2011 has build-in pointcloud support.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkdBaOaYHY0

[DF]

CAD programs have to be specially written to handle the millions of point generated by the lasers, such as with MicroStation and AutoCAD.

MicroStation V8i wasn't 'specially written' to handle enormous pointclouds, it licences Pointools (and very sweet Pointools is, too. I'm currently working on an ordinary desktop with a 4.2 million points LiDAR cloud).

[DF]

Mar dheá. That should be 42.1 million points (the entirety of a certain city's terrain at 2m resolution).

[Ray]

ZW3D can handle that very well. The software costs only $2500~$4000 USD.

Point cloud and reverse engineering are not a big deal to ZW3D.

[Daniel]

I wrote a point cloud custom entity for Bricscad while back as a programming exercise, it reads points in from .las files. If I remember correctly, the upper limit was about ~7 million points. It might be useful in pulling dimensions .?. I added Delaunay triangulation too, but I have no idea if this would be useful.. just not my field. Anyway its yours if you want it, I've posted the source at www.theswamp.org

[MTBSoftware]

When it comes to Digitizing/Scanning and working with Point Clouds, Faro's Focus3D and Verisurf are the best bang for the buck.
Add Rhino3D and you are cooking with fire at a very cost-effective price.