Whether I am attending a seminar, attending a point cloud seminar or teaching a class on how to use point cloud data, one question always seems to come to the surface. That question is centered around how to use the point cloud data for different uses. You see, some people simply want to use the data to show and measure existing conditions via some measurement tools. That is perfectly fine but others want to use the data to create something to show or model from. Different types of modeling can be done in different types of software like creating a piping in Cyclone Model or using CloudWorx for AutoCAD to create a Civil 3D digital terrain model. For a long time, people have used different softwares and used them well but for whatever reason have skipped over 3DReshaper.
3DReshaper is created by a company called Technodigit who is part of the Hexagon partnership of companies. You may know some of these companies (especially if you do business with IMAGINiT Technologies) like Leica Geosystems and their HDS Scanners. 3DReshaper has the ability to cross all verticals and businesses so I would like to show just a few of those in this post.
I am going to start with a civil engineering application. When a 3D scanner is used outdoors where we can't control the wind, weather, trees animals and even traffic, we often run into a problem where our point cloud includes so much unwanted data that it can be rendered useless. In the image below we see a very short project that has many overgrown trees and many cars that have run through our scene. This often requires a ton of time to clean or to create a traditional survey. However, using 3DReshaper's Surveying Tab, we can easily clean up the data to create a surface from.
Using the Ground Extractor modeling tool we can make tell the software to only weed out the ground points. The results are a mesh that include only points running along the ground. The rest of the points are still available but are currently turned off.
This data can be exported as a LandXML.
This software can be used in a variety of ways. Another example of its versatility is using it to inspect existing objects. In the next example, a mesh has been created from a scan and we now want to be able to inspect this mesh for any abnormalities. A project gets created creating the cylinder for the tank. Once this is done we are able to assign a color map to view any errors that might be there.
When completed we see there are areas that are raised from the cylinder that was created and there are areas that are pushed in.
As you can see, there are many uses for 3DReshaper. I hope to cover more of these uses in future posts.
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