Description
Key Learnings
- Learn how to select equipment for exporting as its own file
- Learn how to tag and label for asset tracking and simplified viewing
- Learn how to do advanced dimension features and document information for search
- Learn how to compress ReCap projects with the undocumented feature
Speaker
- Mark LaBellMark LaBell has a passion and unparalleled dedication for the practice of virtual design and construction methods in the AEC industry. He has served as a user and customization expert in BIM/CAD software for over 20 years, and he provides support and training for users to educate them on how to maintain a sound and practical user environment. He had led the implementation of laser scanning on 800+ projects in some of the most complex facilities, including several projects with 3000+ scan positions. He has learned that there is never a “one size fits all” approach, no matter what the client requirements dictate. He has spearheaded and hosted SSOE Group’s annual hackathon, which is a business planning process that enables all staff to participate in business planning and new business opportunities. He has presented at numerous regional conferences, Autodesk University, BIMForum, SPAR International, PSMJ AEC Thrive Summit, BIM Integration Congress, and Midwest University.
MARK LABELL: All right, we're going to start in about two more minutes, but there's some reality capture or visualization, different things up there, if you're curious on what's going on. This is a 360 video camera walk.
This is the Winter Classic, and this was in 2014. This is a big house. If you're from Michigan, you're aware of how big this is. It fits about 110,000 people, and this is actually one highly powered 360-degree camera. I'm zooming in on one of these cats way up here, so you can see from way up in BFE, even through snow. Reality capture, that's the one I just hovered over that guy right there's knee.
So next to the guy with the white sunglasses. That's my buddy that tries too hard. This is the creepiest photo ever that I found in reality capture. When you zoom in, you look at a dude. He's like Michael Myers back there. That one, it looks like the Ooze, so it's the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And this guy seems to be crying while he's scanning. I don't know if he broke or dropped the scanner, but good stuff there.
A little bit of creep factor. If you turn on the intensity, you get some blood on the walls, which is appropriate because they're releasing the new series with Stephen King. From there, some scanning ghosts. So I think we're at right at 8:30, so we're going to get rocking and rolling here. So welcome everybody to AU 2019, first session. All right, thank you. Thank god. All right! I'm pumped. I love this time slot. I've had to do this a couple of years.
This is a lab that I have repeated before. I've added a few tips and tricks just for this year, so we'll see where we're going to go from there. All right. Let's do some slides. All right, so hopefully everybody's in the right room. This is ReCap to the Max. We're going to be focusing how to use ReCap as an application. I mean, if you have the sweet series of Autodesk, it's practically free. But from a registration standpoint, we're not going out to register scans.
And if you're using ReCap to do registration, I challenge you to use something else, because if you're doing small data sets, it's OKish, but you're going to notice that there's some results that you can get from ReCap. You can do the same data registration three times, and it won't give you the same results. So it's a little squirrelly. We're going to focus on how to use it on engineering, architecture, and construction management projects here. So that's the focus.
I thought I had this on. All right, so the goomba that you got standing in front of you with the pink blazer, that's myself, Mark LaBell. I work at SSOE. We're a multinational engineering procurement and construction management organization. Have about 1,000 employees across 20 offices in China, India, US, Mexico. We fly under the radar for our size, and that's because we focus mostly on industrial construction. Our tagline is if you use a computer, which you are today, if you've ever been in a car, if you've been in a building which has insulation in it, if you drank out of a glass bottle, eaten a bowl of cereal, applied pesticides, taken tablets, we've worked on all the buildings that manufacture those goods. So we do a lot of industrial construction.
Myself, I've worked on over 700-- or 600 laser scanning projects. It's probably closer to 700 at SSOE. Most of that's been since 2014. We've really accelerated our usage. It's just nuts. I've started our innovation program and Hackathons at SSOE. And a fun fact about me is I love land yachts, which is big, giant boat cars from the '60s. That's my dream car on the bottom right hand corner. Hopefully I'll have one in a couple of years. It's going to cost too much. I know I'm not going to, but.
Justin Lipsey, raise your hand. He's in the back. He's a lab assistant. He's also been with SSOE for quite some time, started out in the surveying world like myself. He's also been a plumbing designer, recently joined our VDC team at SSOE. And he's really started doing the registration for the scanners that we do own. We do own four BLK scanners, and everything else we sub out that's a large project. I'm not saying a BLK is good for large projects. It's only for small works.
He's done 70 to 80 scan projects over the past year, so he's really accelerated our growth as well. Fun fact, he was the DJ at a wedding-- or he does DJing, and his DJ name is DJ No Request. Don't want those requests, baby.
And then Charles Berteaux. Some of you may know him. Raise your hand in the back there. He's also a lab assistant. He's been with SSOE for five years, four? OK, he's a BIM manager in our semiconductor side of our business. He sees some of the nastiest sights that you'll ever see in complexity. Worked with a lot of laser scans there. He's been a BIM manager, CAD manager for 20-plus years. He's also taken on doing laser scanning on that particular site registration. He also has 18 years of graphical experience and digital media, and he's also a BIM Sith Lord, so evil leader-- evil Vader.
All right, so just a quick agenda. This was already in there, so I'm not going to go over this. But we're just going to basically talk about how if you get a data set, how do you actually correct it, because that happens a lot. Point Cloud cleanup. Again, we're focusing on the end-to-end workflow of architecture engineering and construction. So how do I make Point Clouds when I get a giant data set usable, make it focused, do some demolition from there, and then annotations and assets and communication back with field?
When it comes to demolition, this is a fun sci-fi movie that was my favorite. When we do the demolition, I always say it in a little snarky way, this ain't Wesley Snipes' Point Clouds. That's why I call it Demolition Man. All right, one thing. I want to get this out there. Buzzwords. Let's not use them this year at AU. Anybody good for that? I get some head nods. Woo! All right. So I'm going to get one out there. I want to see this trending. Digital octuplet. This is 10 years of BIM buzzwords.
Real quick. MacLeamy curves. We all see them. I even can say I used one in a presentation. I feel slimy for doing it, all right? Big data, common data, federated BIM. Everybody does it. COBie, ugh. Common data environment. It's like the most ambiguous term ever in databasing, by the way. We need a common data environment. What does that mean? Nobody knows. Internet of things. I remember my grammar teacher early on saying, things is not really something describable. Yet as an industry, we just created an acronym that is the most vaguest thing ever. It's all about sensors and connection, right?
Blockchain. Bitcoin. Ethereum. That thing. Everybody blockchain for construction. What does that mean? Nobody knows still. AIML, or AML. Artificial intelligence machine learning. A lot of people are now throwing this out there to get executives fired up, why we need to go to the cloud. Nobody still knows what it means, because we don't have data condition in such a play. The last one, my favorite, is digital twin. You're going to hear it a lot. It's buzzy as all get out. It's super ambiguous. Please don't use buzzwords at AU 2019.
Digital octuplet. Dropping the mic. All right, few more things, and we're going to get right into the ReCap, OK? It is a lab class. You don't want to hear me blather about a few things. But I want to make sure to give you a PSA on coordinates. Everybody I'm assuming uses Autodesk software that's in this room? OK, all right. If you're using laser scanning data sets, or if you're doing drone photogrammetry data, coordinates is still a disaster. I've had this slide now for four years unedited because it's still a disaster to this day.
If you have a project that you're using Civil 3D, Plant 3D, and Revit, and [INAUDIBLE] we have those projects, and we also use Inventor, by the way. You can't use the same Point Cloud. You have to have multiple registrations, or you force Civil to be in a non-state plane coordinate system, which they don't like. So you have to have two different ones. And even worse, Plant 3D can't work one mile away from the origin, or approximately 5,000 feet. So you have to make sure that Point Cloud is registered to a plant coordinate system that's relatively close, within a mile.
Revit that project-- or that it is about a 20-mile origin. And the other thing that we say is don't move the Point Clouds to design models. Some people look at me kind of weird with that. When you do laser scanning, you can have a model that you base a coordinate off of, but you actually register with the coordinates in mind. Don't just do blank registration and jigger it in. Apply that x, y, y coordinate to fit your columns. Either it's a Northing or an Easting line, or it's a wall. And then you go from there.
Don't keep moving it around, because then once you start going into coordination, Navisworks, everybody's got to move stuff. Something inevitably is going to get screwed up, and someone's at fault for that. This is just like surveying, folks. Never move a survey. Never manipulate a survey. Same thing. Example zero. OK, I started from zero because I didn't want to rename all the things here. So one thing I want to do is we're going to talk about how to QA this.
But when we went through Driver's Ed, does everybody remember going through Driver's Ed? It's been a long time. What were you taught by your parents when you saw a green light? Was it slam on the gas as fast as possible, or look both ways because someone's going to run the red light? Look both ways, right? What does all the registration software do for us?
I'm happy. That's perfect timing, by the way. What does the registration software do for us? They've made it so easy, what does it do? It's a green, yellow, red stoplight report, right? Green's good, yellow's OK, meh, red's bad. Is that really true? How many people have done registration here, software registration? I don't even ask how many people use Point Clouds anymore. First year, it was like three people. It's inevitable. Everybody uses them, right?
For those using-- that held up their hand using registration, is red-- is sometimes red an OK metric? Yes? OK. So just because it's green also means it's not good. You can have this room laser scanned. I can scan the room right next to it. It's identical. Laser scanning software will autoregister it right on top of each other. When it's two separate rooms, it'll give you green metrics.
So just remember, please work. Please remember this. Dang it. I'm not duplicating screens. Hashtag fail. Remember this dancing guy every time you see a registration report going forward, OK? Just because it's green doesn't mean it's good. So this example really I want to drive home is when you launch ReCap, and this has happened to us many times at SSOE where we didn't coordinate the scanning. We didn't bring our preferred vendor, or we didn't do it ourselves.
Somebody scanned in the adjacent area of a project we're doing work in, and they said, hey, we have a hard drive. That's very prevalent these days, and that's not bad. But rule number one of surveying that I was taught when I first became up in the ranks in surveying was never trust another surveyor's work, because there is extreme liability in it. You've got to do your due diligence and make sure they close it out. It's not just throw it away and redo it all. It's just back check them.
Same thing I'm professing here. Back check whoever did the registrations work. Now I'm not saying, open the report. The report's bullcrap. OK? Get into the file and do these tips. So on your machines, we're going to go ahead and launch ReCap, or it should already be open, hopefully. And hopefully it looks like-- let me duplicate my screens here-- that. Does everybody have ReCap open? It looks like that?
Now I saw some people playing with ReCap. I anticipated that. I've done this before. This ain't my first rodeo. If you go ahead and go to View States, there's a double zero home. Go ahead and click on that, and it should get you right back to where we are. Even I messed around with it, too.
Now that we're back to home. OK, we're in a ReCap laser scan project right now. Now of course, you can see that there's orbs in there, just like your normal scan projects. And if you-- like in my scan, this issue here in the project navigator, you can see there's multiple alignment pieces. So you can go ahead and just let's go ahead and click on alignment 1. All right, and that's going to snap you too.
So my tips and tricks for people, and we're going to go through this process. But I just want to show you what this looks like and what an issue this is here is I always choose columns. I choose walls. And I choose big surfaces, so like a floor right here. Like you're looking at the floor. You do a really small limited limit box. And then you turn your scan colorization to location, and you can start to see bad juju.
Zoom in on that column. I have multiple columns. Multiple columns are bad. You don't have multiple columns in the real world. You only have one, unless it's a double column right next to each other. But in that case, you're never going to have a double column like that. Same thing with multiple walls. Does that make some sense? So let's go ahead and click on Home. I'm going to show you how to do this. I just want to show you what we're looking for first.
So I'm going to go ahead and just minimize this project navigator. So I'll give you a couple quick things from an interface standpoint to talk through this, and then we'll actually do a limit box and go through the exercise. So starting at the upper left hand corner, you have your home or your general kind of like think of it open save, preferences, import export options, your file options. Just think of it as your normal file browser.
Right below that, you have your display settings. So if you work from left to right, you use your color wheel. If you hover over that particular, and that's actually called a charm. That's a Windows 8 UI setting that they completely abandoned, but ReCap was developed in the Windows 8 era, when that was supposed to be the next thing in mobile computing. That's why it looks different than everything else.
So if you hover over let's say from RGB, which is your normal colonization from your scanner. If you click on Elevation, you get a nice elevation map. A lot of people actually prefer looking at elevation maps because it almost looks textured or meshed in a way. So you can actually interpret piping very well. You can look at clamping. You can see hangars very clear, where in RGB mode, very tough to see it.
Again, if you scroll down to the one right below it, intensity is another setting. Normals. And for this particular process, the key wave process, Scan Location is your friend, OK? So if you click on Scan Location, it's going to change the colors to based on Scan Location, so you can back check. All right, and then the next thing that we'll hover over is the eyeball. At some point we'll worry about getting to perspective and changing that. But more on that in a moment.
So the next thing we're going to go ahead and do is across the bottom here, there's this limit box. So just go ahead and hover over it. Don't click on it, because if you click on it, it bounces you all the way out to Zoom Extents, which is a frustrating thing. So if you go ahead and hover over it, this is how I QA scans. So you can go ahead and pick the Pick button. I'll just keep my button right there.
So go ahead and select Pick. And again, reference something like a column, a floor, or a wall. There is no right or wrong way of doing this in this particular lab here. But hopefully somebody gets-- everybody gets a particular result. I'll kind of lead you a little bit. If you go ahead and pick, and then in this particular view, you can see that there's this pipe support.
There's a curb for containment. If you go ahead and click just kind of off to the right of that particular pipe support-- oops, I got my timer to make sure I'm on track, which I am. That's always perfect. And then you can change your limit box. So if you just right-click, that's your rotate in ReCap. And I'm just going to make this thinner, because if you're using software like Faro, if you're using Trimble software, if you're using Cyclone or Register 360 from Leica, they have a product-- they have a piece called True Slicer, where you're able to take a small slice of a laser scan and do your QA process to make sure there's good scan overlap.
In ReCap, doesn't exist. They didn't get to finish the whole registration workflow. They created a product to make it work with the BLK. Again, it works good on small stuff sometimes, but in the end of the day, if you want tight registration and good metrics, you're never going to get it in ReCap without pulling your hair out, bouncing your head off the wall, and throwing your computer out the window. I've tried it, OK?
So I've thinned down my slice, and you can see here from a dimensional standpoint, that white dimension in the middle, that tells me how thick it is. It's approximately 10 inches. I try to keep them a foot or less, because if you get them too far, depending on what you're looking at, if it's a site with elevation, you're going to get bad cross-sectional look.
So if you're OK with your slice, go ahead and click Confirm. Hover over the monitor icon. Hover over the eyeball, and then go ahead and click on Perspective, because when it's in blue, that means it's perspective view. When it's off, that means it's orthographic. So fire off the orthographic. Then I'm just going to click on my view cube in the upper right to give it an elevation or a side view. And then you can zoom in and look at that particular curve that I've selected. Of course, everybody else might have something slightly different. Again, it's acceptable, and hopefully you're getting multiple Point Clouds that you can see are a problem.
Everybody kind of seeing something similar, depending on what they clicked on? I see some nods, so that means I have at least illustrated a point. So now how do I fix this? That's the age-old question. You found your scans may not be trustworthy, OK? And you can pull dimensions. And if you see one scan that's off, you go, OK. Without doing reregistration, I can just turn that scan position off. I can export my project in ReCap. The team's happy and satisfied. One scan busted.
In this particular example, I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 different curbs. This entire data set's junk. You can't turn off five different ones and still have a decent Point Cloud, especially in this data set. I think I only uploaded 12 scan positions. So five scan positions caught that curb out of the 12 that were done in the project. Five of 12 are garbage.
So I can either do one or two things. I can take this into Leica Cyclone. That's our preferred product. I also have Faro Scene as well to redo the registration, or I push this back on the people that scanned it and say, fix your bad work. But then that puts the project at a standstill in some cases. So I know we're all stuck in a rock and a hard place with that. But this is how you can actually check it out.
If you only have one or two scans that are busted, here's what's cool. And this is why I use the colorization mode for Scan Location. If you go ahead and click on the bottom right corner, that's called your project navigator. That locks it into place. If you expand the little triangle or carrot next to Scan Locations, and if you just hover over each Scan Position, it'll show you the color and how that matches up into ReCap with the colors. And then you can go ahead and click the eyeball to turn it on and off.
So I think-- yeah, I just turned off one in my particular. And if you're looking at my screen or the projector right now, you can see how stuff is turning on and off. So again, in this particular case, I can go back to the person that laser scanned it and I could say, scans 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, for example, they're all busted. Everything else has good registration. I'm going to keep doing my work. Re-register 1 through 5, send it to me. So you're able to give them concisely what's wrong, and they can go ahead and tighten up their metrics.
Now hopefully, they're not doing scan to scan and moving everything around, because if you are locking coordinates off of the ones that are good, they could remove it around maybe an inch or two and bust all of your work that you're doing as well. I have seen that happen. Does that make some sense? Everybody feel comfortable doing back checking other people's work? Remember, what's the first rule of surveying? All right, what's the first rule of Fight Club? All right, cool. We're good. I got a good crowd here. I like it.
So go ahead and just click through a couple of the other alignments. Just to kind of give you-- I mean, we don't have enough time to do all the examples here. Just to give you a few different top-down views. This one only had two scan positions that touched it. It was a pipe bollard. But you can see you have two non-concentric circles. And if you do, again, that's the difference between doing a limit box too big or not, because things do get cocked in the real world. So bollard in an orthographic view could actually have two non-concentric circles. But when you only take a 10-inch slice, it shouldn't be that off axis.
And here's another one. You can also use dimensions to figure out how busted you are. If they're all very close to each other, you can call it good. In this case, we're almost an inch off, or 7/8 of an inch. That's pretty bad. It's not trustworthy. Maybe your tolerances don't require to be this close. We work in industrial construction. We got to thread the needle a lot of time, especially in Charles's world.
And here, again, just an example, the pipe rack. And you can zoom in, and you can just see non-concentric circles everywhere. So what you're looking for, walls that are just basically-- multiple walls where you think there's one that you know there's only one. Multiple columns, pipe racks that are non-concentric, or piping cylindrical objects that are not concentric. That's what you're looking for, from a QA standpoint going forward.
All right. We feel good? Remember, look at that green report. There's the reason I do some of this stuff. It's for fun, but it's also it sticks, all right? It's kitschy. All right, real quick here. Let's go back. Let's skip back to there. So example one. So now that we've QAed the project. And the first thing you always got to do, QA it, because once you start doing this work, we're going to go through a process called unify the laser scans, where you're taking all the individual scan positions, jumping them into a single file.
If you do that combined into a single file then QA it, you can't delete scan one, because now it's combined as one single Point Cloud. You can't just go back in there and delete that subfile. It's all combined as a single Point Cloud going forward. QA is your first step. Got to do it.
So we're going to talk about how to clean a project. We're going to create some regions, and then we're going to do a quick export to kind of get the idea. We're not going to export everything in this particular process. It's Easy Bake Oven in this particular class, because we just don't have the time. The export process in ReCap does take some time, depending on the amount of selections you do.
We're going to do a neat little feature that's undocumented in ReCap, and this is one of the things that when we were working with the ReCap team before they all left Autodesk, I paused on purpose. They all left. There's some developers still, but the original brain trust all left, and they refounded new companies. And they're working on some really cool stuff. One's working on the autonomous vehicle, and the other one's working on Cintoo. It's a Point Cloud in the cloud. Anybody heard of it? Anybody using it?
OK, is it cool? It's sweet. Still need ReCap though. Still need ReCap, but not much longer. I always said Point Clouds in the clouds would cause thunderstorms, but they figured it out. It's actually really fast, which is amazing. And they got some really cool stuff. I really suggest checking out the Cintoo team in the trade hall going forward. So back to ReCap.
All right, go ahead and let's hover over the Open icon at the top. So if you hover over the Home, the house, hover over the folder, go ahead and don't save your work, please. I do have a class right after this, same exact thing. I have to repeat the session. If you did save it, no worries. I've already anticipated it, but then go ahead and select Example 1 RCP.
Does everybody's folders come up where example zero, one, two, three, four shows up? Curses. All right, so anticipation. There's Windows folder. If you just tab over, there's a Windows folder on everybody's computer. Windows Explorer should be open, and it should be in your directory. You should be in Example 0. If you just back out one folder level, you're going to see all the RCP files. Is that correct?
All right, cool. Double-click on RCP-- or Example 1 from there then. All right, this will take a few-- maybe 60 seconds to load. So this particular example that we're looking at, different project. So we're not going to build off of that particular last example that had bad scan data. But this particular project is all well registered, controlled. You're not going to see any non-concentric pipes, et cetera. It's an outdoor piping example.
And what we're going to do is you can see if I kind of just rotate around and zoom out, it's a wide open outdoor site. Again, there's about 12 scan positions, so we're keeping it kind of small for this particular example. So what we're going to go ahead and do first is Mark's going to stand here like a deer in the headlights because he didn't VPN in to get a license. Hold on. I tested everything on your guys' machines, but I forgot to test my own.
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. All right, good. Ah, success. We got [INAUDIBLE]. All right, cool. Didn't take too long. All right, so again, we're going to focus on the project navigator, bottom right hand corner, OK? So go ahead and click on that. We're going to dock that in place. We're going to go ahead and expand scan regions.
So again, this is a project that's been pre-registered. No registration required. We have about 12 or so scan positions in this particular project. If you want to look at them, you can see under the scan locations. You can expand them here. These are the particular files that you have. We won't go over that quite yet.
But what we're going to focus on is how do I assign data to make it intelligent, OK? Point Clouds, they don't have to tell anybody here. They're not intelligent. They still require humans to interpret what we're looking at, at least not yet. And the reason to look at Cintoo. I'm not saying I'm a fanboy. I'm just saying they're kind of out there, where ReCap is a good back end engine, Cintoo is kind of the future.
We still have to infer it's a pipe. It's a bollard. It's a floor. It's a wall. It's a light fixture, et cetera. It still requires our human eyes to look at things. So what we have done over the years is to make Point Clouds more consumable at SSOE is we go through this process of turning points based, again, off of human look and make them into intelligent sets. So I only need to reference into whatever my downstream app is, Revit, Navisworks, even 2D AutoCAD, Civil 3D, Plant 3D. I only need to reference the data that is relevant to my work, not an entire Point Cloud.
Now we deal with projects that my largest one to date right now is 2 and 1/2 terabytes. It's about 5,000 scan positions. You can't load that. You got to break it up into-- you've got to break it up into smaller pieces. So what we do is, a lot of times, we do work inside buildings. We'll break it up the floor is this one side. Walls are another Point Cloud. The utilities and kind of the structure itself is another data set. And then the equipment that sits in the factory, so you can actually turn on and off those components.
And when you do that, you can also apply compression to each of those. Like for a floor, you don't need every single scan position to identify that it's the floor, right? You still get cracks. You still get your elevations, your dips, your high spots, where there could be bolted floor connections, et cetera, even if you decimated down to 30 millimeters.
Walls, we take them down to 10 as a general rule of thumb, because there is stuff mounted on it. You want clarity. Roofs and stuff like that, ceilings, depends on what's on there again. But everything else we try to keep at a high 1 to 5 millimeter compression setting. So let's go ahead and click on the plus sign. We're just going to create one region. We're going to call it Spray for right now. So go ahead and just type in Spray.
I'm not going to grade you if use caps, camel case. Doesn't matter if you don't spell it right. We're not going back and grading this. And then I'm going to create another one, for example, and just call it Site. If I spelled Site correctly. So I have three regions right now. Unassigned points-- again, everything when it comes in goes to unassigned points. Think of that, if you're an old-school AutoCAD person-- I'm pretty sure everybody's used AutoCAD in this room, or MicroStation, right? Layer zero, level zero. Everything defaults to it.
Same thing with this. Think of it just like that. And we're going to go ahead and assign these objects. So if I go ahead to unassigned points right now, and I click on that eyeball, everything turns off, right? If I turn off Site, and I turn unassigned points, everything's still there, right? I haven't done any selections yet.
So what I'm going to suggest-- and right now we're in an outdoor example, so it's not orthogonal, like perfect. Everything's off a completely different coordinate system. In a building, we try to keep it orthogonal, but there's obviously different organic shapes inside buildings. You're not always going to be able to use a top-down or an elevation approach using your view cube. But for this example, we'll just go ahead and click on Top, just to kind of illustrate what you would use it for. And then you can obviously make an inference for however your scans are for your organizations.
So first thing I'm going to do is, by default, this is an annoying part of ReCap. The selection is always enabled for left click. So for those of us that use multiple CAD platforms, we're used to left click and kind of panning or doing something else. By default, if you left-click, it's at Select. And when you first get into a laser scan, you want to rotate and you just mentally just shut down and you forget. You select half of the terabyte points, and then it just chugs forever. I've done that a lot of times. I'm not throwing any stones out to anybody.
So go ahead. And let's just kind of focus on the southern portion of the site, just do a click-and-drag. And then what I'm going to do is the same thing on the northern side of the site as well. But I'm going to show you a function. If you hold down Shift on your keyboard, you can see there's a plus sign next to the arrow key there. And that allows you to add more to your selection.
So you don't have to do one selection, put it to a region. Do another selection, put it to a region. As long as it's the same type of objects, in this case, we're calling it Spray, right? We can just kind of keep on going around the perimeter of the site. You can see where the laser scan data falls off, and there's not a lot of information. And I'm just holding down Shift the whole time.
Now let's say I selected too much inversely. I still haven't put this to a region yet, and you can see I have points that are highlighted in white on the screen. If I hold down Alt on my keyboard, there's the minus sign. So now my selection is the reduce, or the redact from the selection. So I can just, again, window collect. And if I'm happy with my selection-- hopefully everybody has followed along and they're happy with their selection. You can then go down to the bottom, hover over Region, and the reason I told you to turn these off ahead of time is as soon as you select something, it's no longer visible. So you don't accidentally put it to another region.
So go ahead and just toss it on Spray, and now you see what you have left for a Point Cloud. Saw some head nodding there, at least makes sense. Anybody confused by that? No. OK, so the same thing. I'm going to click on my view cube here to change it into elevation, so I'm in a top view. Go ahead and click on the bottom arrow, or you can click on the right side arrow. Doesn't matter. Just go to any elevation view. Right, we're just illustrating this real quick.
This is an exterior data set. It's better to do this, obviously, in a building because floors are more flat. There's still slope to them. You could have ramps in a floor, and it works a little bit better. Same thing for walls. You can get right on the outside of a building and do a very thin slice for selection. And it works better. But we're just going to do a quick illustration. I'm going to zoom in. And you can see, as I zoom in, it looks all juiced or jacked up, right? We're in perspective mode.
So go ahead and hover over your computer icon. Hover over the eyeball, and then go ahead and click on Perspective. It should be blue right now. Then to turn it back into orthographic. Now again, because we're in a site, you can see I still have points that have varying elevation, because it's a rolling pipeline site. It's not perfectly flat, but this is where I make a crack on flat earth. Yeah. Some people are like, uh, this is too early in AU for a joke like that.
I'm going to zoom out, and I'm just going to do a window again here. And this is where that redaction comes in handy, right? So I'm just going to kind of blindly pick up and then select Down, so I'm going to select what's considered the top of my grade here. And then I right-click in 3D Rotate, just to get a preview. Now that's actually a really good dumb guess from where I was. I got most of the site. I'm not going to try and go in detailed here, but you would just kind of keep doing that process to get the rest of the stuff.
Same thing. Once you have your selection, let's say you're OK with it, you hover over your region. And then you just toss it on to site one, and it goes bye-bye. Now the question I get a lot from our users in-house, as well as in the labs, is, well, if I put it on there, how do I get it back off?
And this is the key way process in this as well is turn off unassigned. And then go ahead and turn site back on. Go ahead and hit Escape, because it's the last thing that we did. It's still selected. And then you can zoom in and see. Maybe I got too much. I've got some piping in there. That's not good. So I could go back through here, do a selection, again in elevation. And I'll just leave it like this, so everybody can kind of see. It highlights in the color of the region. And then you would just hover over the region and then say, Unassign at the bottom. So it just brings it back to the unassigned.
Or you can reassign it to a different region, if you wanted to, called piping or whatever it may be, equipment example from there. So I'm just going to go ahead and click on Unassign, and you can see it disappears from my site. So again, the purpose of doing all this assignment of laser scan points to a region is we're going to export this into files that you're referencing it in. Questions? I saw a hand kind of-- Yes?
AUDIENCE: When you're designing the random points in Spray, and you're doing that over [INAUDIBLE]?
MARK LABELL: There's two train of thought. I teach Spray, because if you want to export it and then you realize later on I might need that for some reason, depending on how crazy you get with your spray region, there is times where I delete it, too. I just know it's bad. It's just scanning noise. It's way out there, right? It's not even anywhere near scope, and it's not intelligible.
But there's sometimes we'll get far enough in with the Spray where it's like, we know we don't care about it. Like it's right on the property line of this. We just went to the fence line, but there are some trees. And we might have to coordinate with those from overhead lines or something like that.
AUDIENCE: Is there process [INAUDIBLE]?
MARK LABELL: No, it won't bog ReCap down. The more you select on a bigger data set, so what you'll have to do in this particular case, and this is why I'm keeping this one short, is you export where you are. And then let's say you have the unassigned points, right? You still have that? Maybe you didn't get everything to site, but you have that unassigned points. You export everything as is as its own file, then go back and create a new ReCap project and put that unassigned points in there and start splitting that up more.
And it sounds crazy. This is why it's somewhat painful. But then you bring another ReCap project together, and you call it site. And you bring all the RCS files that you created as that process, site 1, site 2, site 3. And then you can combine them together, the one master site file. Or if you're breaking them into quadrants or bays or floors of a building, however that works.
Unfortunately, it's painful, but ReCap is dang next close to free. Faro Scene's like 10 G's. Cyclone, depending on how many modules you get, could be like 40 grand. The low end is like eight grand. If you're getting Register 360, it's like four, three, four grand. So it depends on what your appetite is. Those ones are better, but there's still some of those same things. They still slow down on the export process, too. There's just different things with those softwares, where this one's by far the easiest and most intuitive for people that are not laser scanning professionals to pick up.
Any other questions before we move on to the next step here? So let's say we're happy with our selections, right? We're not going to go through the whole process of dividing this up. We don't have that time. I'm going to turn everything off, with the exception of Spray.
Now there's two ways you can do exports in ReCap. I'm going to show this one first is I turn everything off but the feature that I want to export. I hover over the home. I hover over the down arrow, because the down arrow is import. The up arrow is export, or Control E for shortcuts. And then go ahead and make sure to dump this to your local computer. You don't have to do this at this step. We're just going to cancel back out of this. But you save the files when you're doing exports to your local computers. Never save them to a server, because ReCap's then trying to take like let's say a 5 gig file and then save it over to the server.
And depending if you're Wi-Fi, if you're hard network, if you have a slow network, it's going to be really slow in that export. So take the limiting factor out and go right to your hard drive. If you don't have a large enough hard drive, I know this sounds painful. You'll have to work with your IT departments. I say that tongue-in-cheek. We have a good relationship with our IT department.
I know Charles sometimes like, eh. Sometimes I even yell at them. Justin yells at them, too. But they actually work with us pretty good. My machine, so does Justin and Charles, we all have secondary one terabyte hard drives, not just for processing data. But we actually have a custom application that copies all the data local to our machine. So if I go to a client meeting, I have Point Clouds with me. All of our engineering and design support staff, if they're on a large enough project, gets a secondary dedicated one terabyte drive. We're talking those things are $200.
And engineer bill rates, everybody already knows how much their engineering company bill rates are. Generally speaking, it's $100 or more per hour. So all you have to do is save two hours of time to buy one of those. IT can't argue that. If they do, go to your executives at your company and then stomp on them. That's what we had to do. Say shortcut the system. Sure?
AUDIENCE: You're talking a local hard drive attached to a machine?
MARK LABELL: No, internal. Not an external drive, because then you're talking USP 3, which has got a limiting factor of-- depending, what is it, 35 to 110 megasecond? Solid state hard drive, you're getting, depending on the brand, you're getting like through puts of like 10, I think up to a gig or 2 gig. I know we have a four terabyte raid on one of our Point Cloud processing machines, and the thing just screams. So yeah, solid state all the way. Samsung Pros by far.
I've processed on this particular one almost 100 terabytes of data, nowhere near failure. My other machine's got like 90-something terabytes of process data on it, and it keeps the metrics nowhere near failure. I've had it for four years. I mean, so that was a $500 investment four years ago, and it's still working.
AUDIENCE: So hierarchy local hard drive, maybe, if you had to, an external server [INAUDIBLE].
MARK LABELL: Never do the server. Once you get everything done, then pop it to the server so the rest of the team can see it. But again, advocate for getting secondary hard drive through your users. That's the Point Cloud experience. And you could see that-- I mean, you're in VM, like a VM right now. I'm not, and this thing-- I mean, it's only 12 scans, right? It's not large.
But this, you don't get when you're pulling it up from a network. It's splotchy as all get out. Any other questions before we go to example 2?
AUDIENCE: So just by turning off the scanning [INAUDIBLE]?
MARK LABELL: Yep. If you want to, let's say, export all of them at once. That's the one thing I'll show here is if you're in scan regions, again, whatever ones are on, there's this option to do it right here is export. And I have a couple options. So I would go to RCS. I would choose my drive. If I hit Export, I get Unify Settings. And now this is going to apply the settings to all of them.
So this is where this particular example, it could be OK or it could be bad, because I like to apply decimation, because if you decimate a Point Cloud in the stuff you care less about, it's obviously less space in your storage. IT people get happy. It's also faster for your users, that data, again, going back to that floor example. You can decimate that down to 30 millimeters, still good enough to do engineering. You can even do an FFL flatness off a bit, because it's still enough data. It's more than a normal survey, which is every 25 feet, taking a rod shot.
So this is where you can apply, if you're doing them all en masse, all the same compression. You can change your spacing all the way down to 1 millimeter. That's the minimum. That's no compression. All the way up. 100 is the max. If you do 100, the data looks absolutely terrible. I would never suggest going over 30 in most instances, because at that point, to the gentleman that said earlier, why not just delete it? It's not valuable. If you go to 50 millimeter, it's just so sparse and it's hard to collect real good, intelligible information from it.
At that point, you just hit the rocket ship, and then it'd go on and do its export. All right. So for all of the lab users, go ahead and go back to Windows Explorer. We're going to go ahead and crank-- oh, sorry. Forgot one step. We're going to do one more step before we go to example 2. Sorry, I got ahead of myself.
Let's say we went through and did all of the regions, right? So let's go ahead and turn everything on in our project navigator. This is one thing. This is called the ReCap hack. Not documented anywhere in the handout. There's links to my screen cast on how to do this. So after, if you don't remember all the steps, don't worry. There's actually like a five-minute video on how to apply what's called the ReCap hack. And this came from the original product team before they all took flight and went to found their own companies again, because most of the ReCap team were all startup guys, bought by Autodesk, created a great product, did their time, left.
Great guys. I mean, created a really good product for our industry. So let's go ahead. Zoom all the way out, top-down view. And if you just do a giant swath selection, right? Just big, huge select everything, right? You have to have all of your regions on. Select it, and then just hit Delete on your keyboard.
At this point, so that's step 1 of the ReCap hack. Put everything on a region. Do your exports. Step 2, top-down view. Select all, Delete. Step 3, Save As, not Save. Because if you just Save, you're just saving that you deleted all the points from your database. Save As goes through and creates a new project. We can call this example 1-1. And then hit Save, and you get two options prompted to you. And it's telling you, this is a warning and it freaks most people out. Take the dive. It'll be OK, trust me.
What you want to do is select Remove Points. What that's going to go through, and we're not going to-- hopefully nobody selected it. If you did, I'm talking long enough. Actually, go ahead and select. I'll just talk about it anyways. It shouldn't take that long. If you select Remove Points, what it's going to do is copy that example 1 ReCap project that we started, create a new one based on what we saved. So it's keeping the entire folder structure in place. And then it's going through-- if I can show you on the back end. You can see 1.1, and it's created the exact ReCap folder structure. It's copied all the files right now, and all the data is intact.
And you can start to see all of these files, these dot RCS files will get smaller. It's basically deleting all the points from the RCS file, but it's keeping the entire ReCap tree intact. And you have to do this if you want to be able to use unified data sets, like what we just showed, plus the real views.
If you don't care about the real views, those 360-degree cameras, you don't have to do the ReCap hack. But most people care about them, at least in our organization. The engineers, the architects, construction management teams, they love them. Lot of information in there. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I honestly think it's worth more. It saves a lot of our teams a lot of travel from going back and forth to client sites. They can get there just like they're in the actual factory or facility, take dimensions, and they don't have to understand the Point Cloud back end.
The Point Cloud is great for all the people doing the design fabrication modeling services, but your engineering, architecture roles, the people not in that type of software on a day-to-day basis, the Point Cloud's very cumbersome. It's just not something they're used to seeing. But the photos resonate very well. So this is how you kind of combine the two pieces together.
And we're back. Oh, I shouldn't have done it. Sure.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
MARK LABELL: Yeah, like so an exterior and interior almost. And we do. Yeah, we scan. Like if we scan the exterior, you know you get the facade of the building. You got a pipe rack coming in. That's its own data set. Interior would be its own data set, and then we would take that interior as an example and break it down into even more intelligent. Floor would be your file. So if it's only a single-story building, it'd be the floor is its own file, just the floor. Equipment, right? Or furniture.
Walls would be a separate file. And then ceiling would be a separate file, and then we'd have like utilities and structure all as one, because that's generally what we care and coordinate against. In the case that we don't want to wait, which is the case, right-click on your taskbar. Go to Task Manager. I have done this thousands of times. Kill ReCap!
If you didn't do everything I told you to get to this debacle that we're in, you don't have to do this. But go ahead and just right-click on there. End ReCap. I love the fact that this is just going to keep popping up. Hopefully it drives that whole stoplight thing back in everybody's head.
All right, so now we're going to jump to step 2. So let's go ahead and go back to our folders. Double-click on example 2. That's going to launch ReCap. Sometimes I do a Freudian slip throughout these presentations. I haven't done it yet and call it ReCrap. Oh, I just did. It's a solid product. It really is. Just the registration gets dicey.
OK, so example 1 doesn't look any different-- or example 2 doesn't look much different from the surface of example 1, other than the fact that the ReCap hack has now been applied. So that whole Save As, the points are there. I also went through and imported all of the scanned positions that we've went and unified. And I did a nice little trick in here that is grouped everything together, so there's a folder called Real Views, and there's a folder called Point Clouds.
So if I was to click on the folder called Point Clouds, it turns everything off. And this is where you can get into, if you have a multi-storey building, all-in-one ReCap hack file, floor 1, floor 2, floor 3, you only want to see floor 1, you just click and you organize them based on a folder structure to turn off all the other folders. Otherwise, you couldn't do that in ReCap, because then you'd have to go through and know scan positions. 21 through 40, or floor 2. You have to click each individual one. It's very painful. You can just group them in there.
Now to do that, let's go ahead and click on this project navigator. We want to lock it down, and I'm going to show you how to do that process right now. So we're going to go ahead and pull everything out of the folder called Point Clouds and turn it all back on. So if you just left-click and drag, I'm going to show you here. So you can see it. Then I'll just hold it long enough so you can do it yourself.
If you left-click and drag, you can just pull it all the way to the top, and you'll see this blue line. And that takes it right back out of the folder. So let's say if you put it in the wrong folder, you can just kind of grab it. Now unfortunately, there is no way to Shift select multiple and just drag them into one folder. So you have to do this one at a time.
If you want to create a folder, if there's no folders in a brand-new project, you just drag one file or scan position on top of the other one. And then it prompts you for a folder name. So ReCap is awesome. That's my folder name. I can go ahead and finish out dropping everything else in there.
So this also, from a file management standpoint, keeps it very clean and tight. Again, think of your end user in your organization. If you don't need to do this, don't go through those steps. In terms of the project, we don't do this on all projects at SSOE. Very large projects, lots of end user, lots of senior engineers and architects that are not in the technology as much as some of the other staff members, we go through and do this extra piece because it makes it a lot easier for them to be able to hop to the points that they need, those points of interest.
We'll even go ahead and we have an application that if we apply what the x and y spacing is between column grids, it'll create an annotation in ReCap forums, so they can actually just search using a feature that we'll show in a few minutes and find it without even having to know exactly how anything in ReCap works.
But again, you can go through here. You can organize, and then you can turn things off and on based on that organization. So again, here's my folder. Here's the file names. Now we go through and we have the file naming standard for let's call it non. Like if the client doesn't have a particular one. In this example, you'll see there's a P. The P stands for pre-construction. The LIDR stands for Lidar. If it was photogrammetry or a drone, it would a PHGM.
And then we use a four-digit code, kind of following national CAD standards, the whole single four four criteria, which the last four shows what it is. So you can look at the file name in Windows Explorer and know that's the file I need, because it tells me it was pre-construction, it's Lidar data set, and it's the first floor, or it's the site, or it's the spray, or it's the equipment. So again, getting down to making intelligent, faster actions for everybody on the team. Name your files appropriate. Just don't call it Point Cloud 1, Point Cloud 2, Point Cloud 3. Now you have pseudointelligence behind it to make your operations faster.
All right, so for example 2, what we're going to do is create some markups. This particular piece, we're not going to highlight anymore because it's not-- I don't think it's 100% really usable anymore. But there was an option where you can use ReCap 360 website to communicate. It still does work, kind of. But we found that just most people don't use it.
And then do do do. So let's go ahead, and I don't think I have View States home. If you rotate, I'm going to look at it from a top down. There's this kind of like little lean-to, OK? If you kind of rotate and zoom in there, or if you want to fast pass it, I'll just hover over the real view. It is the ES-- basically look for dash 20 if you're in the right hand side, your real views. And if it's that one, this one right here, this 20, you can click on the Geo Locate, and it takes you right to that particular position.
So that's what's cool about, again, the ReCap hack keeps all of the real view information intact for positional accuracy and then, of course, the real view side of it. So to go into real views, if you just clicked on it like I did, it'll take you to the position. Or to the bottom, you can click on real view.
OK, so we're going to focus on some of the starting workflow of what's called demo scope. So this particular project, let's say this skid's going to come out, and we're going to demo piping back to a particular flange. Now don't worry if you're not a piping or process expert. Again, it's a pretty easy example to follow and bring it back into what it is you specialize in in your business line.
So we're going to go ahead and use the markup tools. So you have by default two options when you select markup. It's a rectangle and fence. It just depends on how crazy you want to get with it. Some people just go, you know what? It's just like blue beam, right? They just draw a fence, they call it good, and they put in some notes about this particular piece.
I've also seen people that go in and then use the fence option and then painfully keep clicking and trace perfectly around. And it's just you keep clicking multiple. And then this is where the fence is nice, because you can kind of trace around the flange connection there and then call it good by either double-clicking on it or hitting Enter.
Once you have an object that we're going to call demo, you can click on that red blob. I'll let people click-- catch up, because I hear people using the fence command like crazy. That or they're playing Candy Crush on the computer. I'm not sure which one is it. No answer, so it's not Candy Crush hopefully.
All right, and then you can change it so it's more like a demolition scope, right? You can also click on it, and this is where I suggest, if you're using this workflow and then select Add Details. So this is where, when we do demo packages, we've done this workflow a few times at SSOE, and sometimes we don't. It's not like every project we do everything I'm showing here, but just kind of giving you the highlights or best practices. We can call that demo, skid, or equipment.
In the second box is where you can put in a bunch of details. Remove the entire skid. Keep lean-to. Demo back to flange. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. OK. Cool workflow if you had additional images, if somebody took a picture while they're out there with their iPhone. Maybe there's tags of the equipment, more clear information where that exact demolition point is, because scans, they're not going to get anywhere near as many points of incidence as you could with a camera or an iPad.
You can go ahead, attach images. It's kind of a feature that doesn't-- you don't see it get used too much, but it is once in a while cool. You click on OK, and then you're done. OK, so we've identified some demolition scope. But let's go ahead and use a few more-- a few more of the annotation tools. And some of the things I'll talk about, I'm going to spin 180 degrees based on the particular position I'm in.
And you can see that there's these walk-- or these white lines spray painted across the ground. When we talked about coordinating laser scans, one of the things we did on this particular project is we coordinated survey GPR, or Ground Penetrating Radar, and laser scanning. And you coordinate that in concert, just like you would any other type of a process on a construction project. Get the surveyors out there first, so they get the boundary and the survey control.
They can pass that data off to your GPR contractor. They get on the same coordinate system, and then they start locating underground utilities. They apply spray-paint on the ground. The last person to come in, your laser scanning crew, then can capture all of it in one data set. Write coordinates from the surveyor, GPR exact location of the undergrounds, and then all we have to do is take their AutoCAD file that they generally give you-- most GPR contractors will.
And you can actually export, if they use text attributes, in the right coordinates automatically into ReCap. I can only say that that's happened twice over all the projects we have ever done it on, but it's sweet when it works. In this case, they didn't do that process with the using attributed text in AutoCAD. So we had to go through and apply annotations of what those underground utilities were.
But we can still use ReCap as a central source of information for what's in the field. So again, as a model manager, BIM manager, VDC manager, whatever, kind of that technologist role, that particular individual in this project just went through and dropped tags where those undergrounds were. So they would go through and use the-- if you hover over it, it says Distance right now for me. It might say Markup or Note for you.
Go ahead and click on Note. And you can just drop-click on whatever piece of that spray paint. And we used warning for critical undergrounds that we weren't-- you couldn't get anywhere near without hand digging. Everything else that was like way too deep or something else that wasn't critical-- maybe it was just a conduit or something like that wasn't a big deal-- we would just identify what it was.
So we'll just use an example that this particular one was maybe a two-inch natural gas. And then go ahead and click OK. Go ahead and apply another note to another piece of the white spray paint. I'm just going to call this one Warning 12 inch Main. Call them whatever you want.
And then I'm going to go ahead and rotate just to the left, where there's piping. And you can see it and kind of show another feature. So again, if you go to your distance, so if you hover over a note because that's what you're using, if you hover over distance, there is a pretty cool feature in ReCap. It's called Pipe Snap or round objects, so it doesn't have to be just a pipe. It could be any round object. It could be this case on here, right?
If I click on that, turns it blue. Blue means it's engaged. And if you hover over an object, like I did for that case on, it will actually give you a green preview around the outer circumference of that particular round object. Now there's two things you can do at this point with pipe snap is if you click on that object, like I just did, now you can pull a dimension from that round object either from the outside of it to another object.
Or if you hit Alt and then move your mouse, then it goes to the assumed or calculated centerline position of that particular round object. How many people in the process, refining, piping, anybody? Chemical sectors. Centerline of pipe kind of hard to measure, right? Otherwise. But it's a very critical thing that we use all the time.
So you use Pipe Snap. So I'll just hit Escape, start over. Distance along the bottom. Click on Pipe Snap, because that locks it in. It makes it blue. And if you're to use, let's say, freehand dimension. If you hover over that, if you wanted to use an orthographic dimension, let's say you rotated your Point Clouds and they're orthographically aligned, you can use xy.
I don't trust those as much, because buildings are never perfectly plumb and square. But z is a good ortholock that's used a lot. Again, you're looking for head knockers, clearance, stuff like that. So use Pipe Snap. Hover it over a round object. I will tell you the further away from the camera view of where you are, the less likely it is to actually snap to that object.
Also, usually speaking, I found that anything smaller than two inches, it doesn't do a good job of actually doing an outsider pipe snap. So it does work great for bigger utilities, but small stuff, eh, not so hot on.
So if you click, so initially when you pull the dimension off of there, it goes to the outside. If you hit Alt on your keyboard, so hit the Alt key, and then move your mouse. Then it snaps it back to the centerline. So Alt is the tag toggle, kind of like when you're doing a window selection, and it toggles between remove or just keep adding. In this case, it changes between tangential dimension versus centerpoint dimension.
The other thing that they don't tell you very well in ReCap, and this is actually one of my favorite parts of Pipe Snap is I don't even want to dimension it right now. I just hit Enter. So all I did was do the Pipe Snap command. I didn't draw the dimension to another object. I just hit Enter, and it throws a radial dimension on that particular object.
So I've used this a lot on projects where there's a lot of congested piping. You can identify it from like looking up in a real view like this, because if you hit Escape after you've done that, and you click on your dimension, you notice that there's a little paperclip stack of paper. That's the Add Details button in ReCap. So you can go ahead and click on that Add Details.
And in the bottom here where there's more information, you can type-- you can see OK, it's an outside diameter of one foot and basically approximately 7/8 of an inch. And if I know what that utility is, let's just call it [INAUDIBLE]. I've now created something that's searchable. Every time you add details, and that's why you add those notes. That's why you added that-- you did that demo note that we just did a few examples back. That's why we do the Pipe Snap is I go in and I do the Pipe Snap on a bunch of pipes that are right next to each other. And you look at the labels on them, at least in a lot of the process, they'll tell you, one-inch pot of water. Cold water, chilled water, glycol, eviscerated meat slurry.
You think I'm joking. That's real. Anybody work in food? Yeah. They're shaking their head. That's a real thing. Eviscerated meat slurry. Ugh. Sure.
AUDIENCE: Where do you go to search for these? You just go to that search bar and type it in?
MARK LABELL: Yeah, so again, adding intelligence, right? We're trying to add intelligence to ReCap. So I go back to the search, and all this stuff we've done, we've just turned it more into an intelligent. Think of it like Google version of a Point Cloud, right? A Point Cloud is not intelligent when you first scan. It's just millions and millions of points with a color value, nothing more.
We're going ahead and applying that fabric, and that makes it easier for downstream users. So if I type in, for example, the word demo, it shows all markups, annotations, scan positions, et cetera, with whatever characters I typed in there. And if I hover over it, you can see there's this little locator symbol. And if I click on it, it takes me to the exact scan position and view of that.
So I'm going to highlight this a little bit better here. I'm actually going to jump out of the laser scan, or the real view position, go way over here. If I search demo right now, it takes me to that real view. So again, making it for the people that are not in the software often, this makes this really usable.
That's why I say ReCap, there is a lot of great features of it that do make it a very consumable product for people. And again, at that point of it's nearly free and almost anybody can use it, from the processing stuff we're doing, if you have clients, it's a free download, just like Navisworks. And they can do all of this stuff. Once you've compiled this, they can consume all of this.
Can they create additional pieces of it, like scanning regions and breakups? No. Can they add annotations? Yes, to make it more robust for them, and that's where it becomes a highly powerful communication tool between organizations.
All right. Let's make sure I'm on track here. Pipes [INAUDIBLE]. So last thing we're going to do. So let's go ahead and go back to our project navigator. So I've created a bunch of annotations.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
MARK LABELL: Oh, sure.
AUDIENCE: Can you export the notes and markup?
MARK LABELL: Can you export the notes? What was that? Can you export the notes and markups for-- what were you thinking?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
MARK LABELL: You can. So the export-- actually, I'm going to show you how to import them. So the export of all the markups are CSV file format. And it actually gives you the xyz location of that. So if you wanted to get kind of creative, you can use like import text in AutoCAD. There's a couple other ways that you can kind of like import nodes into other programs, where you're able to take-- if you're annotating it in one platform, like ReCap, you can actually push that information back and forth. There is ways to do it. It's just a CSV file. So depending on how you're import file-- import a CSV into your downstream application is, you do have to do some formatting to get around that.
That's the custom app that I talked about with the column spacing that we did. It's just a mathematical calculation dumps it to CSV, and then we have to re-move some columns around, then bring it into ReCap.
So in this case, go ahead and go to project navigator. For annotations, again you have your up and your down arrow. So go ahead and click the down arrow. That's import CSV. And if you click on the Browse button, something tells me it's probably not going to take you to the correct folder location if it didn't work from the open. Is that correct? Or you see in example 3 dot CSV. Does everybody see that or no? Ugh!
Yeah, it's in the example 3 folder, but it's data sets. Hold on, let me tell you what that is. Yeah, this class named dash L1. Yep, and then it's in the example, example 3 folder. So if you go ahead and dump that in-- I'll wait for everybody to catch up-- then you would click the Import button in the bottom right hand side. And then it's going to dump in a bunch more value.
So again, if you did a bunch of annotations in a CAD program, and you have the available bandwidth to take it to a CSV file, you just have to make sure-- and this is why they tell you this particular screen here is what they're looking for is the XYZ location. So everything again has got to be in the same exact coordinate system. You can't have Revit in one coordinate system and a Point Cloud in another. They've got to be in the same.
And then here's the other columns that you're looking for, which is the note, the title, and then the actual note description. So what kind of feature it is, the title of that particular feature. So 20-- 12-inch natural gas. And then if there's any information in there. If there's no information, you just have to make sure and put a space in the each cell in Excel. That's what I found when you're importing data and there's no information on that metadata tag, you have to make sure and put a space in there.
Go ahead and click Import, and you can see that there's more tags now that are showing up throughout. Just general stuff. Again, it builds that search engine that you have within ReCap under that search feature. So the more information you have in here, the more robust it gets and the easier it is for people to find information within ReCap. And they don't have to hunt and pack and just walk around aimlessly. Yes?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
MARK LABELL: Those net annotations do not. You have to actually do-- there's a way to actually export those tags and then bring them into CAD objects to show them into Navisworks. Because you can't use attribute text either from AutoCAD into Navisworks. You have to actually explode it. It's workarounds. Any other questions?
All right, so let's go back to our demo. One last piece of this to highlight, and I'm just going to show this based on-- yeah, I'm going to just show this based on time. If you want to follow through, you can. So we're going to take this piece of equipment, this skid, and demo it, all right?
So real quickly, if you do a limit box, this is going back to what we showed in example 0. Do the pick feature. Hover over it. Don't click on limit box. Hover over it and click on Pick. And then I can go ahead and kind of pick on a feature of that point of that piece of equipment. And then I can just start dragging it. Otherwise, if you just click on limit box, it's going to make it zoom way out. And then you get to zoom in and mess around. So it's a little bit more tightened up. So I'm just going to drag this to that particular piece of equipment.
I'm going to make sure that my limit box is low enough that that structure roof is gone. Go ahead.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
MARK LABELL: You're in real view mode. All right, so you should have a somewhat tight limit box. So now in ReCap, you're only seeing that particular piece of equipment, like I am. Everybody pretty close to this? Go to scan locations. And if you have a folder, either if you left it alone in the Point Clouds or I created one called ReCap is Awesome or you renamed it whatever, look for the one that's called Site. If you don't know where that is, you can always even use the search engine and type in Site. And you can even turn it off in the search engine as well. You don't even have to go all the way to project navigator.
So there's my site. Is off. And the purpose of what we're doing here is, again, we're demoing this piece of equipment to the flanges. So my site's off. One last thing to do is go ahead and hover over the monitor. Hover over the eyeball and click on Perspective, because if you don't-- if you have perspective on and when you make a selection in ReCap, it's selecting based off of that perspective view. Everything comes to a single point at some place.
So hover over the computer monitor and then hover over the eyeball and then click on Perspective to turn it off, because when you want-- when you're selecting points in a Point Cloud, you want to make sure you're on orthographic, because otherwise, if you have something that-- let's say we're looking at it in elevation, and you have 3, 400 feet of a Point Cloud, that selection is going to actually select behind it at a weird perspective as opposed to orthographic. You want a square.
So for simplicity's sake, we're just going to go ahead and do a window. Left-click and drag, and I'm going to get it close to the flanges. We're not going to dial this in, just based on the particular time we have here. Everything's white that's been selected. Everything else that hasn't been selected is not white. I haven't created a region ahead of time. You can always hover over region then to say new region and then just call that demo, just like we did in example 1.
Same process at this point. You'd say, OK, I've removed my piece of scope that's demolition, because I'm going to put a new particular skid in there. I'm going to re-pipe it up, based off of the new package that's coming, that we're purchasing. And then that gives me my space to coordinate. I can run clash detection and Navisworks against the Point Cloud, and I know where I actually have issues as opposed to if I don't do this demo right now, there's going to be a lot of clashes that are basically false clashes that come up.
It also shows me my appropriate space that I do have. If I wanted to keep the foundation on this particular piece of package equipment, I could just rotate out in elevation and go, OK, here's the foundation. I need to keep that. We're not going to repour a pad. We know it's going to be a little bit smaller. We're just going to put in the bolt configuration there.
So at this point, because we created a new region again, you would just take the p dash Lidar utility. You can turn off the spray if you wanted. We would export that as its own file, and then we would turn off this region called unassigned points and then export the demo as its own file. And then now you have a file that is completely cleaned of all the demo scope, and then you can start doing your coordinated design efforts from there.
A lot of times on our projects, we're talking crazy pull ahead schedules. We can never get in there and do a laser scan after they do the demolition of equipment, because we've already issued for bid, and people are prefabricating at that point. So we have to do demolition this way. Very few times can we actually go in and scan as a demo is taking place in our client sites and we're still doing engineering concurrently. Most of the time we're way ahead of the game on that particular effort. So that's why I'm showing you this particular way.
But it could also be used for planning, too. Maybe it's a piece of equipment you're taking from one location, across maybe, let's say, the Southeast US, and you're moving it to the Northwest US. Or you just don't have drawings, so you scan it. You trim out like this. And then you can use this and copy and paste it as much as you want in your design software.
Any questions before we go to the last and final example? All right, so let's go ahead and example 3. We're going to say, don't save. Fire off example 3.RCP. And just like the Easy Bake Oven, everything that we've done so far is compounded itself into this particular data set. So now it has the ReCap hack. It has all the annotations we created and imported. It has the demolition of that particular scope that we did.
So if you go ahead and just kind of look in the bottom right, project navigator, you go into your Point Clouds. You can see that there's a P dash Lidar demo in there. If I zoom in to that particular area, I should be able to see my demo if I turn it on.
Utility also still has it as well, so you just have to turn off utility if you want to see it. But one of the things that I want to show in this particular feature, it's pretty cool. They still list it as beta. I don't know why. It's been out for like two years in ReCap. It's actually maybe even longer, three years. It can be one of the artifacts of just the team has basically been ruled down to some programming efforts and such.
But if you want to add an attached project, you can see down here in the bottom right. It says attached projects. It's called beta. To do that, if you hover over your home icon, go all the way to the down arrow, the import, and you can see that there's that little triangle with the beta tag on it. Go ahead and click on that.
And again, you'll have to more than likely go to manually path it to see data sets, the class name, and then look for example 4.MWD, because this is technically example 4, even though we're in example 3 data set. And it should tell you you have success on a project.
There are times where, depending on the version of ReCap, if you're in an old version of ReCap, you're not in the newest version and you're in the newest version of Navisworks, it will actually not say success. So if you're wondering, if you take this back to the office and go, well, I'm on Navisworks 2020, but I'm still on ReCap 2018 for some reason. If you're on the lower version of ReCap than whatever Naviswork you're on, this will not You have to be on the same versions, or you have to be on an older version of what ReCap you're in.
So ReCap just has to be the newest version. Basically think of it that way. Some organizations, they have IT policies that limit what they can download and when. So I just want to put that out there as that's why it would fail. Another reason it would fail again is if your Navisworks model is not coordinated on the same coordinate system as your laser scan. It would import, but when you go to your real views to oversee it and overlay it, you wouldn't see it.
So this particular example, if you go in to the real view folder, there's a real view called 04 at the top. If you go ahead and click on the Locate button, it's going to take you into the area where it's just gray space, all right? And I did this on purpose because I obfuscated some client data. But I still wanted to show a good example. So there's no laser scan data here, but you're going to be able to see the real view here in a moment.
So it took you to the position of the scanner. If you click on real view, it's going to go ahead and take you into the real view. And then you'll be able to pan around and see that Navis model. Of course, again, it's far away. And I've unfortunately had to do this on purpose, so I apologize. It looks kind of crappy. There are positions that are a lot closer and coordinate much better.
But because of where our design work is in this particular project in an area that I'm technically can't show up close-- I can show it like this, but I can't show it any closer, just to kind of drive home the point. That's how you would be able to do it. Actually there is one data set that I can show that does a way better job of that. All right, let's go ahead and-- PowerPoint, come on. Work for me. Let's do this.
Is there any questions while I open up that example?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
MARK LABELL: Yes. If you want to actually do a coordinate a Point Cloud, you have to use Navisworks as your viewing engine. But again, if you're looking at people that aren't Naviswork savvy and they want to see the picture with the image overlay-- or the design models overlaid on it, this is an option. Some people like it. Some of our engineers enjoy it. Some still prefer Navisworks. Again, it's an option in workflow. We use it sometimes, but not always.
A great example is-- let's see if I have that by default in here. Let's see how fast I can do this, to show this on a good data set. Give me great success. There you go. Any other questions while this spins for about 10 seconds? I'm going to show a much more pertinent example of actually why it's a pretty valuable data set.
So this is an example here. You can see where there's a lot of process equipment, re-piping. Let me take a little bit closer stance here, and you can see it a little bit better with that column not obfuscating the view. There we go. So you can see a lot of the stuff that's changing out, based on the new rebuild that's going through.
So that's where it's highly valuable. You get that picture that everybody can resonate with, that Point Cloud sometimes is still grainy enough and Navisworks that a senior engineer, senior checker doesn't quite understand it. But you put the two over top of it like that, and it looks beautiful. One of the things you can also do from a real view is you can change the color view, because a lot of times once you start getting into factories, all the stuff that you really care about, the utilities is up, and lighting's below it. So you get lots of hard, dark shadows.
You can change that intensity, and it looks 10 times better. And you still get a color Navisworks model on top of it. So it's a pretty sweet coordination tool. Again, it's not something we use all the time. But in some cases, it really just drives home the intent of what we're trying to do with what's in the way.
So this is one of those that Plant 3D, Revit, Civil 3-- or not Civil 3D-- and Inventor were used. So again, making sure those coordinates were sitting on top of each other and drilled perfectly. One last thing. I just unfortunately don't have time to walk everybody through, but we'll show real quickly here is Navisworks and how to move voxels. So once you've broken everything apart, you can actually have intelligible voxels.
So I'm going to go ahead and open up this particular example data set. And you can do this in Freedom. You can do it in Simulate. You can do it in Manage. And again, I'm just going to go to this particular piece, and this is why you break this up is if I have this piece of equipment here, here's my ReCap model. If I expand that, you can see that I can click on each of these particular pieces. And I can turn them off, just like you would want to do in Revit or anything else.
So if I don't want to see the site and I only want to see the utilities, I don't want to see the spray, there it is. Here's the demo, and here's something that's really cool that you can do. Now this is a particular piece. So I can item tools. Should be able to. Come on. I've done this before. Everybody's watching me.
Hold on, let me open up Simulate. I might have lied. You can't do it in Freedom. Sorry. Where you can actually move pieces of it. So if we're looking at a particular while this loads, let's say function, let's say control panel, we're just going to remove the control panel. We can talk how we would actually cut that off the piece of equipment without breaking up or demoing it down too far. So let's go ahead. Any questions while I open this up? Go ahead.
AUDIENCE: When you say a bunch of different files, [INAUDIBLE]?
MARK LABELL: Each file separately. So that way, you only link what you need. If you don't need the site, but you want to link that into Navisworks for context, do it only Navisworks, right? Link what you need, because the more you load in, the slower your performance gets down to. This all gets down to performance, right? Point Clouds are huge, and they ain't getting any smaller. I don't care what anybody tells you. That RTC came out, and the data got bigger, not smaller.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
MARK LABELL: No. There is not a way to do that yet. The only thing that we found if you have factory design utilities, there's a plug-in for Navisworks that shows the real view orbs, where they are in Navisworks. And if you click on it, it'll take you right to ReCap and load that instantly. But it's still not integrated into the design platforms. So the actual real view scans, I haven't seen a roadmap item. It's been asked for by a lot of people, but I've yet to see that.
All right, so here we go. That's what I need. So in Simulate Manage, if you click on Item Tools once you have a voxel-- and a voxel is just a volume of pixels. That's why it's called voxel for short. You can select multiple by just holding down your Control key and Navisworks. Let's say it's this control panel.
And if I want to move that out, I can move this particular piece and not have to move or break up my Point Cloud any further. If I wanted to, let's say, again, we're in early level planning. If I did like a Windows select, I can say, OK, there's my piece of equipment. I haven't done demo in ReCap yet. And this is why everybody asks simulations. You can just do light simulations. You can just move that right out.
Or you can just go Control H or right-click and hide it. And that's my free space that I have. If there is a truck, and we've used this to save our rear end. We had a really tight integration with a client equipment, and we were trying to get a forklift through there. The laser scanner picked up the forklift. It picked up everything on that particular site.
We said, OK, here's the new design. It's very tight, the new process tower. We picked up the laser scanned in Navisworks, the forklift, and used that particular feature I just showed you, item tool, moved it, and drove it right down there, and showed you your [INAUDIBLE] will fit. If you upgrade it to something bigger, it won't. But if you use the one that you have, or something smaller, it will. Do you believe us?
Bought off [INAUDIBLE] right away. No design were used. Nobody taking tape measure in the field. Nobody freaking out about it. All mitigated through that little function right there. So there's a lot of ways you can use laser scan data in Autodesk software. Hopefully you've gained a few examples that are relevant for you going forward. I'll open it up to questions. If not, otherwise, I appreciate your time and have a great AU 2019.
[APPLAUSE]