Through the Interface

Conceptual modeling in a drone-captured environment

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I thought I was done with my posts for the week, but this was too good not to share. The below video shows a scene being captured using a GoPro Hero 3 Black edition on a 5-second timelapse setting mounted on a DJI Phantom drone and processed with Photo on ReCap 360 before being used as a basis for a conceptual model created in Revit 2014. Phew.

This is very much a proof-of-concept rather than a genuine project – no architect was involved, for instance – but it does a good job of showing the possibilities of this kind of workflow.

  1. Jim Tinney Avatar
    Jim Tinney

    Very Nice. I'm converting all my Civil 3D users to the Infrastructure Design Suite Premium so that they can start using some of these tools. Steep learning curve but so much you can do with all of the different packages - ReCap, Revit, 3DS, Infraworks... it's a little complicated 🙂

    Reply
    1. Kean Walmsley Avatar
      Kean Walmsley

      Indeed... there's always lots to learn.

      Great to hear from you as ever, Jim! 🙂

      Kean

      Reply
    2. James Maeding Avatar
      James Maeding

      Have fun with IW. Its cool but you will find the challenge is not overloading it with data. You start pulling in trees and hi res images and the performance drops a lot. Maybe a subject you could look into Kean, as the default 3d objects are hi-res and heavy. Especially since Adesk talks about it being a design tool, they need to look at the basic bottlenecks going on. Also, try posting that heavy model to 360, draped images will be down sampled, ruining them. IW stands on its own without design ability, the real issue is getting C3D fixed because that is supposed to be the design platform for Civils.

      Reply
      1. Jim Tinney Avatar
        Jim Tinney

        Thanks for the tips. Our primary challenge is going to be doing all these high res designs in C3D of roadways and etc., then somehow getting that same data into IW etc. to create presentations and "general public impact meeting" type illustrations. The difficulty is dumbing the dwg down enough that it's not so huge and dense, so using nice high res pictometry for the surfaces doesn't get excrutiating.

        Reply
  2. Andre Avatar
    Andre

    Kean,
    I have enquired about Lazers scanners her before and it seems that they cost something like 60K and up..
    Would this method somehow be a complete replacement for scanners?
    How can we find out more on the whole method?
    Thanks

    Reply
    1. Kean Walmsley Avatar
      Kean Walmsley

      Both photo-based reconstruction and laser scanning have their place: this was a great use-case for a photo-based workflow, but it's not as clear-cut as saying photos will replace laser (laser scanners are coming down in price, too).

      I unfortunately don't have anything more on this - you might try checking Shaan Hurley's blog in case he's posted more info.

      Kean

      Reply
      1. Andre Avatar
        Andre

        Thanks

        Reply

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