Software
SiteScape Multi-Scan With SiteScape Pro AEC professionals can now use the iPad Pro or iPhone Pro to scan buildings up to 5,000 sqft by merging ten neighbouring scans into a single point cloud. Greg Corke caught up with company founder Andy Putch to find out more
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iteScape was one of the first construction-focused mobile apps to take advantage of the LiDAR sensor built into the iPad Pro and iPhone Pro. The software was designed to make LiDAR scanning more accessible to AEC professionals. It raised the question: why use an expensive laser scanner or handheld SLAM, or make do with a Disto and pencil and paper, when you can use a commodity device to capture a site or building very quickly? SiteScape launched as a free product in Autumn 2020. It was followed in Autumn 2021 by SiteScape Pro, enabling AEC professionals to sync their 3D scans to the cloud, share them with collaborators on any device and annotate with comments and measurements. Export support was expanded to take in .RCP, as well as .PLY and .E57 formats, so data could be more easily brought into CAD, BIM, point cloud and collaboration tools such as Revit, AutoCAD, Archicad, SketchUp, Navisworks, Recap, CloudCompare, Revizto and many others. At the launch of SiteScape Pro, founder Andy Putch told AEC Magazine that while the software could be used on retrofit projects, for early-stage design, he saw a bigger role in construction, for capturing as-built conditions, or for resolving issues on site. The focus was on scanning small areas of interest. “You’re not going to go through and scan an entire commercial building and try to piece that all together,” he said. But, as it transpires, SiteScape’s customers didn’t listen. Putch explains that power users started sending in examples of scans of large-scale projects, “Once they got comfortable getting the scan data into Revit, or whatever product they wanted to use, they were hooked. It was like, ‘I just want to get more and more 30
May / June 2022
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[scan data] from different times, from different parts of the site, larger scans.’” Requests started coming in for a workflow that enabled multiple scans to be easily stitched together. The SiteScape team quickly ‘cobbled together’ a ‘hack’ that used open-source software CloudCompare. “It was a way to get to an end result, if you needed to brute force it,
but the learning curve and manipulating the data in 3D [in CloudCompare] is quite difficult,” he says. Putch recalls that, much to his sur-
1 Multi-Scan capture on the iPhone Pro 2 Merging of scans with simple alignment
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24/05/2022 17:19
