Scan to BIM Technologies for Construction

Building information modelling has been greatly facilitated by the recent development of technology that supports the use of data-rich models in architecture. Parallel to this, 3D high definition laser scanning technology’s capabilities have rapidly increased and it is now widely used.The potential to record the current built environment is obvious, even if laser scanning has frequently been linked to fields other than architecture and construction (such as heavy engineering and oil and gas projects). In fact, well-established ideas in architecture and materials conservation about how crucial it is to precisely monitor and detect the significance of surface characteristics are ideally suited to the use of scanning to record geometrical quirks as well as planned detail. The workflow processes needed to incorporate the output of laser scan data into a BIM environment are covered in this study. Although point clouds can be imported into industry-standard BIM software, some post-processing and modelling are still necessary to get the most out of the highly accurate and frequently massive data files. We outline a method for transforming cloud data into realistic surface meshes and investigate how the resulting models might be connected to meta data in a BIM environment.