Continue reading »]]> New Site, New Focus

For a number of reasons I was not able to post in quite sometime. In fact it has been almost two years. Well now I’m back and excited to start up again. I have missed being able to write out my thoughts and experiences. A lot has changed in the last two years, not so much for me but for the industries I work in. In the past my focus has been on BIM, Scanning, and other technology news. This was primarily driven by both my interest in technology as well as my belief that there was a lot of misunderstanding about effective use of technology. I still believe there is a long way to go with effective use of technology however I have come to firmly understand that the issues do not lie within the actual technology but the within all of us who deploy, manage, and use the technology.

I have moved the site from Drupal to WordPress which should greatly reduce the time I spend maintaining the site and allow me focus on more thoughtful posts. As part of this move my lack of PHP ability meant that I had to manually copy each existing post to the new site. I was amazed by just how far technology had progressed in very real terms. I had so many posts bemoaning the lack of point cloud support within Revit and now Revit not only has native point cloud support but even a set of feature extraction tools that make it one of the most powerful AEC point cloud solutions. It has become very clear to me that the technology has outpaced the industries ability to effectively use it.

This is certainly not a new problem. Whether the chainsaws impact of logging or CAD on drafting boards there exists a long and storied history of technology outpacing adoption and the inevitable push back. What I feel has changed are two key things: global competition and the speed of innovation. These two forces combined mean a company can ill afford to not adapt and they must adapt quickly. Problem is, people haven’t changed.

Although I’m sure that my love of technology will still be front and center on the site, expect a lot more about how the technologies relate to the people who have to use and manage them.

Continue reading »]]> Background

The traditional workflow for our scanners has always been:

1. Setup the scanner in position and adjust targets
2. Run a the scan
3. Select the targets
4. Acquire the targets

Repeat..

With the release of Leica Cyclone 7.2 came the ability to extract black and white targets from scan data automatically. This for the first time would allow us to skip steps 2 and 3 of our process and potentially see vast improvements to our data acquisition speed.
It would take several test and production trips for us to feel comfortable enough to trust in this new ability. Now almost a year into using auto-targeting I feel confident that the process has worked and successfully reduced our acquisition time driving down the overall hours to complete projects.

Disclaimer

The Challanges

Possibly the biggest drawback to this approach is missed targets. There is no avoiding the fact that on a project you will have missing targets. Sometimes it is the software that can’t seem to pull a target that is clearly visible, sometimes it’s a operator error of not making sure enough targets are visible in scan. Over the year we have seen improvements as our scan techs have adjusted to the new process however the bottom line is; there will be issues and they will have to be corrected in the office.

The Benefits

The process has delivered on our hopes of reducing field time. In fact were able to acquire data so quickly that we have a need to increase the number of targets we own to keep up with the movement of the scanner. So far the only trade off, for us, has been a slight increase in office time. Another benefit of the process is we have been able to greatly simplify the collection of data. By proxy this has increased our pool of scanner technicians.

The Results

For some time now I have worked by the principle of “You can not improve what you do not measure”. As part of this I have began measuring what I can and in this case have a sizable body of data covering hundreds of scans and many completed projects. From this data I have chosen two very similar projects that accurately represent the average numbers I have seen.

As shown, there was a dramatic drop in minutes per scan. These numbers take into account the entire work required for 20 positions. It includes things such as breaks and issues with the scanner into the average. As mentioned, this was very typical of the hundreds of scans I have data on. To see the full story you really need to look into things on a scan by scan basis.

Although each project varies in its specifics each follow this approximate pattern. That is to say that the auto-acquisition projects follow a relatively consistent path hovering around 9 minutes scan-to-scan with the occasional bump for a break or lunch. On the other hand field acquired projects almost always display an aggressive saw tooth pattern. They typically begin with several scans in the 20-25 minute range then start jumping around as targeting becomes more complex. Towards the end of the day targeting typically becomes easier and things begin to pick up again.

The data also reveals other interesting information, for example projects using field acquisition on average take more breaks and for longer times. It also shows the extreme impact that issues can have for example if a key target can not be acquired and a scan must be redone the effect can often push the scan-to-scan time to over an hour for field acquired while recovery for auto-acquired is only an additional 4-5 minutes.

The extended results of this workflow go far beyond scan-to-scan times as one might deduce. For projects requiring multi day travel the savings of expenses can be sizable.

Continue reading »]]> Yet another Autodesk product is getting native point cloud support. This time it is 3D Studio Max under the name Project Helix. It is an official technology preview available from Autodesk Labs. This is one more piece in the point cloud puzzle. We can now do high quality renders featuring point clouds without the need for another application. I am excited to test this out.

Source: http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/3dsmax_pointcloud/

Continue reading »]]> I recently wrapped up work on a large scanning project where we scanned about 1 1/2 city blocks of downtown Chicago. This project was unique in our use EdgeWise to convert the scans into a format that could be brought into Revit. The folks over at SPAR thought we had developed an interesting work-flow and asked to feature it in there monthly news letter. It was nice to see a project I worked on featured this way.

Continue reading »]]>

This a good read albeit rather long. Despite greater acceptance of IPD type contracts you seldom see real numbers placed to the outcome.

“A significant key to IPD’s promise is its ability to manage and mitigate risk for the three principal parties: the owner, the architect/engineer, and the builder. By aligning the goals of these parties around what is best for the project and making each party responsible for the behavior of the others, all three parties gain more control of the overall process. Increased certainty means lowered risk.”

Source: http://info.aia.org/aia/ipdcasestudies.cfm

Continue reading »]]> Over the past year or so I have been working on a large project of a public plaza in the heart of downtown Chicago. In the middle of this plaza is a large sculpture by Alexander Calder. As part of the project we scanned the entire plaza which included the sculpture. We eventually model the sculpture adding it to our BIM model to assist with restoration work.

As the project progressed the thought never crossed my mind that this public sculpture may not have been released from copyright. I have known for some time that only works of architecture constructed after 1990 are typically subject to copyright and had assumed that the sculpture, as part of the architecture, would fall into that category. I was wrong.

Public sculptures are not consider architecture and fall under the traditional rules of artistic copyright. These rules make it pretty clear that the sculpture is in fact a copyrighted work of art. To make things more interesting I discovered that in most cases the copyright is not signed over to the buildings owner but remains with the original artist or there estate.

You may be asking “So what’s the big deal, your using it as part of the restoration project?” This is a reasonable and possibly correct statement. The problem can come up when the images of the work inevitably find there way out into presentations or worse yet promotional materials for your company. In our case the fact that this may be sketchy ground was brought up after a presentation in which the sculpture was shown. I am still not entirely sure that this was a problem but clearly using these images in company promotional material would be.

This also speaks to a larger issue that we all face when scanning. The scanner captures everything. Weather it is sensitive materials left on a desk or copyrighted sculptures, we as a profession must make sure that we respect the data that was obtained.

Further Reading

Continue reading »]]> Robo-Scanner

Interesting concept of a remote controlled scanner. Looks like a Leica 6100 scanner.

…a joint project between Missouri University of Science and Technology and the University of Missouri-Columbia. As part of the project, which began in 2008, students at Missouri S&T have built a remote-controlled robot that is equipped with an infrared camera and LIDAR…

Source: http://news.mst.edu/2010/02/robot_provides_3-d_images_of_d.html

Continue reading »]]>

There has been a ongoing discussion thread on LinkedIn group Club Revit in which members have been sharing links to Revit content. I have summarized, sorted and combined the contents into a more usable list.

Full list after the break…

All Discipline

Autodesk Seek
http://seek.autodesk.com/

CADDetails.com
http://www.caddetails.com/ (requires registration)

CADForum.cz
http://www.cadforum.cz/catalog_en/?fo=RFA (Requires registration)

RevitCity.com
http://www.revitcity.com/index.php

RevitComponents
http://revitcomponents.blogspot.com/

RevitFamilyMan.com
http://www.revitfamilyman.com/new3revitfotwpage.htm

Arcat.com
http://www.arcat.com/bim/bim_objects.shtml

FormFonts.com
http://www.formfonts.com/browse/browseObjects.php?area=1&area=1&dimensions=3

Reed Construction Data
http://smartbim.reedconstructiondata.com/

Architecture

USG Design Studio

http://www.usgdesignstudio.com/wallselector.asp

JELD-WEN Windows and Doors

http://www.jeld-wen.com/architecturaltoolbox/index.cfm

Kolbe & Kolbe Millwork Co.

http://www.kolbe-kolbe.com/architect/index.cfm?logintype=architect

Structural

Simpson Strong-Tie

http://www.strongtie.com/drawings/revit.asp

 Mechanical & Piping

American Standard
http://www.americanstandard-us.com/resources/

AO Smith Water Heaters
http://www.hotwater.com/lit/revit.html

Applied Air
http://appliedair.com/building-information-modeling-bim.asp

ClimateMaster
http://www.climatemaster.com/index/comm_literature

Greenheck
http://www.greenheck.com/drawings/

Kohler
http://www.us.kohler.com/tech/cadsymbol/cadsymbol.jsp?nsection=1&nsubsection=1&nitem=link8

L.J. Wing
http://www.ljwing.com/building-information-modeling-bim.asp

Loren Cook
http://www.lorencook.com/About/destools.shtml

SPX Cooling
http://spxcooling.com/en/about/detail/revit-files/

McQuay
http://www.mcquay.com/McQuay/BIM/Revit-BIMFiles

Price
http://www.price-hvac.com/software/revit/

Ruskin
http://www.ruskin.com/revit.aspx

Sierra
http://www.sierra-fas.com/building-information-modeling-bim.asp

Sloan
http://www.sloanvalve.com/Customer_Care/Technical_Downloads.aspx

Taco
http://www.taco-hvac.com/en/cad_wizard.html

Temprite
http://www.tempriteheating.com/building-information-modeling-bim.asp

Titus
http://www.titus-hvac.com/software/revit/Revit.asp

Trane
http://www.trane.com/Commercial/Products/product-templates/CadUserCategorySelect.aspx?i=1154

http://www.trane.com/commercial/AboutTrane/ContactUs/SalesOffices/BIMIntroduction.aspx

Victaulic
http://www.victaulic.com/content/cadandsoftware.htm

Watts
http://www.watts.com/pro/whatsnew/whatsnew_3dCAD.asp

Electrical

Acuity Brands Lighting

http://www.acuitybrandslighting.com/BIM/

Focal Point Lights

http://www.focalpointlights.com/resources/BIM.html

Lightolier

http://www.lightolier.com/resources/downloads.jsp#BIM

Mono Systems

http://www.monosystems.com/revit.asp

Siemon

http://www.siemon.com/us/download/bim.asp

Visa Lighiting

http://www.visalighting.com/site/resources/bim-building-information-modeling

Paid Content

http://www.turbosquid.com/Revit
http://www.symbolmachine.com/
http://revitfactory.com/
http://www.broutek.com/
http://www.revit-content.com/
http://www.revitstore.com/
http://www.archvision.com/

Source: http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=11154919&gid=126297&trk=EML_anet_qa_ttle-d7hOon0JumNFomgJt7dBpSBA