Do you need to convert point clouds to CAD objects?
That’s a topic of hot debate in terrestrial laser scanning – what work processes and technologies let practitioners get the most value from laser-scan data?
One process breakthrough is to work directly with raw point-cloud data from inside a CAD environment, without converting the point cloud to CAD objects. The key advantage is that practitioners can perform operations such as clash detection between point-cloud data and new CAD geometry without the penalties in time, cost and accuracy of first converting the point cloud to CAD.
Another benefit is that high-density point clouds from the new generation of high-speed scanners can be displayed as near- photorealistic renderings in the CAD system, so designers can work in the context of high-fidelity visualizations of existing conditions. Older approaches required point clouds to be decimated (thinned out) to avoid overburdening the application and computer by their sheer size, but this resulted in hard-to-understand, “ghostly” imagery. The new techniques let the CAD system display the raw point cloud without bogging down.
This new approach, pioneered by BitWyse Solutions, Inc. with its LASERGen application, has found a growing number of champions at some of the world’s largest and most successful engineering/ construction contractors and owner/operator companies. Further validating the efficacy of this approach is Cyra Technologies, Inc.’s development of such a capability. We expect others may well adopt similar strategies.
