My Career in "Laser Scanning"

11 years. It seems like a lifetime ago. 11 years ago I started work at a Trimble dealership with an Autodesk side to the business. One of my first tasks? To learn Revit, inside and out, so that I could instruct it and support it. But the Autodesk dealership was small, the Trimble dealership was the second largest in North America. So "Trimble" was the word and I was surrounded by talk of construction equipment, laser scanners, robotic total stations, and civil design. This was a new world to me, coming from a world of architecture. The Civil design... it was our life blood on our Autodesk side of the business due to our loyal Trimble clientele.

I should mention that the architecture side of our business was yet to be built up to be the organization it came to be, it was still in its infancy. I was brought in to help with the growth and support of it.

We had great employees and great support staff. One of which, on the Civil side, was the best of the best... I've never met anyone better.... so much so that Autodesk hired him away from us and he still works for them today. 

Back to me: Within 2 years I was thought, at least internally, to be a Revit expert. In reality I still had a couple years to go. But due to this expertise I was asked:

"How can we bring Trimble and Autodesk together for Architecture"?

It was so successful on the Civil side, why not the Architecture side as well? The answer...at least at the time... seemed to be bring point cloud data into Revit. We were doing it all the time in Civil. So that's what I did... and I did it well. I had years to look at data, tweak the way it was used, refine how we saw it, all inside of a Revit environment. In that time I reconstructed parts of historical buildings and traditional office spaces, all from point cloud data. I even worked with individuals from outside scanning companies because I was the expert on the final output and usage of that kind of data within "my" software of expertise. 

In time I moved on to a structural engineering firm. This firm did designs for processing plants, particularly concrete. They sent myself and a colleague on-site to do multiple scans (nearly 100 in total) of a campus of buildings so that we could perform design work around the scan data. My job? Once the data was processed (which my colleague painstakingly did) I took that data and incorporated it into the Revit model. Then my role was to train the structural engineers and manage the model data, in Revit, as required to design some incredibly complex structural and mechanical support conditions. 

I've never been more proud of a design team, they did great!

Unfortunately, it did not take long before I realized that doing all this structural work just wasn't for me. So I moved on to direct the technology within a large Architecture / Engineering firm. In that role they learned about my expertise and I was (9 months in) working on recreating parts of a Monsanto campus directly from point cloud data. That... I admit... wasn't a fun project. Myself and a co-worker manipulated the data and cut it down into narrow "wedges", and modeled buildings from the point cloud data from the ground up. We finished the project and they liked the end result. Due to that project I really learned how to enhance our modeling speed and accuracy, because time wasn't a luxury we had. There was a project deadline, there was two of us, it had to get done. It did. 

When I moved to my current job I had no expectations of needing to manipulate point cloud data again. Then one day one of my colleagues in another office received a Matterport scanner!

Unfortunately, I knew nothing about the capabilities for this specific type of scanner... which was really new territory for me. Scanners can vary from density to speed to accuracy to output file type... there was never a standard on what you might get from a new model/brand. Thus I kept quiet and let him experiment. Experimenting is the best way to develop expertise (I know that I had no one to ask in my early days) and frankly, there's no reason to give advice when you have no idea what kind of output the device could generate. 

Then, suddenly, I was provided a Matterport of my own. My own office was going to now look to me to be the expert on it so that I could utilize it and train others. I now had flashbacks from my Trimble / Autodesk days! So I reverted back to what I've been doing for years... getting data and discovering what I could with it (if anything).

There's no reason to wait for a project, so I created my own. I took my new hardware and performed a quick scan of my office area and exported the data. For more than 8 years I had labored with point cloud data in Revit software... actually in other software as well (Navisworks comes to mind) ... so I took to this output very quickly and just had to try it in Revit. I'm glad I did. Now it seems I will be using this data too in future projects. 

As of today I've performed approximately 800 scans in the last month.... and I can see that I won't be getting away from using, training, or advocating others toward the use of scanners any time soon. Scanners have advanced too much in capabilities to be ignored. That includes image quality, speed, accuracy, and affordability.  

DISCLAIMER: I'm NOT saying they (scanners) solve all problems. They have the potential to create problems (primarily in computer and model performance) particularly by those less experienced. I'll also mention that modeling duct, pipe, etc from them can certainly be done but even the best processes (often software enhanced) require experience and good judgment on how to interpret and handle the vast quantities of available data. Scanners don't do the work for you, but they provide you an incredible dataset to leverage if you know how.

It is also important to know: Owning / Renting a scanner does not mean you will know what you should do with it at first! I guarantee you'll think "I wish I had thought of that" or "I wish my co-worker had let me know" at some point because that scanner could / would have made your life easier. The value they bring seems to change every month and you will need to keep on top of the latest news to maximize their value.

Scanning is part of the past, present, and certainly the future. I can't wait to see what the next 10 years will bring. 

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. 

If you enjoyed it please do click LIKE and click SHARE to share it with your network. Thank you!

Also, if you would like to read my regular posts then please click 'Follow' 

Cheers, Happy Reading

Gagan Malhotra