- A 15 acre culturally significant site in Saudi Arabia included the ruins of a number of mud buildings. Scanning was the only practical method for capturing the as found condition.
- Much to the surprise of many AU attendees the firm was able to come up with a workflow that eventually loaded the point clouds into Revit.
- The Revit product managers need to hear from users that point cloud support is important.
I sat in on a presentation today that involved a cultural site in Saudi Arabia. It was an urban renewal project that covered 15 acres and involved a number of very old ruins, that had to be accurately restored as part of the project. Traditional surveying was out of the question, given the remote location, but more importantly because of the poor condition of the very old mud construction. The only hope for accurately documenting the existing condition was laser scanning.
As the speaker noted, he had just returned from AU where he heard from a number of people that it was just not possible to load point cloud data into Revit. He had to disagree, since for the past 6 months his firm had been working with point clouds from the Saudi project using Revit. The only catch was the convoluted 6 step workflow and the fairly small limitation on file sizes. He did manage to load point clouds into Revit, but it was less than ideal.
I am not sure why the Revit product managers do not see a need to support point clouds. With their product the de facto BIM standard it seems to me that it makes sense to support 3D data in a 3D modeling environment. Customers need to send this group a message.
Hello Gene,
Very nice post. As you know, our kubit PointCloud provides tools for working with the cloud data within AutoCAD and we are always getting the “Revit Question” from our customers and many attendees at these conferences. A simple answer for many people to understand is by saying “no, Revit does not work with cloud data.” We tell people this as well but only to drop the illusions that Revit will currently handle large volumes of points (millions/billions). There are a few work flows for working with data in Revit but currently the only way to work with the points directly inside is by importing small portions. This of course puts users back at the normal limitations of Revit (Few hundred thousand points). We teach our users that are desperate to work in Revit to multi-contour or multi-slice the cloud into various pieces in AutoCAD with PointCloud and then export the points as AutoCAD points. They can then bring them into Revit. This cuts down the number of points being utilized and gives the user a decent base of the design.
I was approached by a firm at AU this year that claimed to have modeled a building in Revit from cloud data. The truth is ,they had sliced a floor plan, measured the elevation of the building and stretched the floor plan. In the end, only a few hundred thousand of the millions of points scanned for the building were used. Seems wasteful but it worked.
There is no doubt that the community is knocking on Autodesk’s door for a cloud/Revit solution. I think it is only a matter of time before the engine created for AutoCAD will work with other Autodesk products. First, they have to work out the AutoCAD side of things, then its on to more. Just my opinion though. Again, great post. Talk to you soon.
Scott Diaz