Screenshot captured from Autodesk Construction Cloud, showing a combination of manually created design objects and classified mesh objects federated into a single view, highlighting coordination issues and inaccuracies in the design model.
The team was introduced to PointFuse’s unique meshing software and immediately requested a free 2-week trial. As Noah explains:
“I quickly realized that this workflow would be perfect for what we’d been looking for. We’d been trying to find something like this for a while.”
Immediately upon testing the software, Noah was impressed by how easy it was to convert the point cloud into a mesh model, reducing the file size down by up to 1/100th of its original size – now in MB not GB – meaning that a scan could now quickly and easily be viewed, classified, and shared.
He wanted to test this out on a previous construction project where reality capture data was available and had already been used. A recent cheese plant expansion, completed in Wisconsin the year before, had utilized point clouds so it would establish a good baseline for the new methodology. This was a large project that had incorporated both the renovation of existing areas and the development of a new addition. Between two of the buildings was a corridor that was a high traffic area in terms of mechanical and process systems, and the objective was to route new systems through this section. Due to the limited size of this area and amount of existing structure and piping systems, the refitting of this was highly complex, and so Noah felt that this would be a great place to try out PointFuse.
In the original work, the team scanned the corridor using a Trimble X7 3D laser scanner which created a large point cloud 20 GB in size. A virtual construction specialist was then tasked with modeling the existing conditions from this point cloud using Autodesk Revit, essentially tracing over the point cloud. This is a tedious and time-consuming process due to the complexities of working with large point cloud data. In fact, this task took 40 hours before it could be uploaded into Autodesk Construction Cloud Model Coordination, ultimately increasing project time while reducing the available time for the designers to implement any changes to their models.
It was the perfect place to test out the PointFuse solution.
Screenshot from Autodesk Navisworks, showing the classified mesh model prior to being imported into the coordination workflow.
Workflow that Miron Construction have adopted to effectively utilise their laser scanning data as part of their BIM coordination processes.
