Connecting the Dots with Point Clouds, the AEC Collection, BIM 360, and Construction Cloud

MATT WUNCH: Hey, good afternoon, good morning, good evening, wherever you are in the world. Thank you for attending Connecting the Dots with Point Clouds, the AEC Collection and BIM 360 Autodesk Construction Cloud. My name is Matt Wunch, Senior Technical Specialist on the AEC side at Autodesk. And I have a co-presenter with me today, Shawn Weekly, Principal at Southern Company.

Let's take a look at our agenda, got to go over the introductions, talk about what's new in ReCap '22, scan to mesh, publish and view 3D images, cloud collaboration, storage. We're going to jump out of the presentation and do a little bit of a live demo to go over some of these things live so you get a feel for what is actually involved in these processes.

And then Shawn is going to take us home with how he's using ReCap at Southern Company and some of the things that they're doing with the files. So a little bit about me, former Autodesk Expert Elite prior to coming on board with Autodesk just over a year ago, got about 2 and 1/2 decades of experience as a CAD BIM Technology Manager dealing with Revit, AutoCAD, Civil 3D, InfraWorks, installation development, templates, training, you name it, I've dealt with it in one way or another.

Some of you may recognize me from the part time technical support on the directly third party platform. If you've ever had any issues or submitted any tickets, you may have seen me there as well. Now I'm going to kick it over to Shawn to discuss a little bit about himself.

SHAWN WEEKLY: Sure, my name's Shawn Weekly. I'm a Principal, which kind of is a solutions architect at Southern Company, which is a large utility company in Birmingham, Alabama. I have about 20 years of experience in software and solution architecture and systems design, and about 15 of that, 14 and 1/2 in the utility industry. And we're really focused right now on digital transformation in our substation station design department.

MATT WUNCH: Thank you, Shawn. So the obligatory safe harbor statement, I don't believe we are going to be showing any sort of future developments, but just in case something does pop up, just sort of cover our bases there.

So what's new in ReCap '22?. We talked about the scan to mesh earlier. So that used to be available, I believe, a few years back. It was taken out, but it's now back again, so having the ability to take those plane clouds and create an editable mesh that you can use in any of your applications.

Also the published view annotate and collaborate, this is really huge when it comes to being able to share those point clouds with users who don't necessarily need to have ReCap installed. You can do that through the cloud, and, of course, cloud storage, the integration of Autodesk Docs now.

So what are some of the new features of ReCap Photo? If you have a drone that is able to capture the RTK or the PPK data, so the real time kinematic or the post-process kinematic, from the drone photos, you can incorporate that into the processing. The specifying of ground control points really tie that mesh, that model, even tighter.

The cloud credit consumption has changed a little bit. So for every 50 photos, it now costs three cloud credits per 50. And if you've installed the latest updates for ReCap photo, you now have the ability to upload up to 2,000 files, whereas before, it was just 1,000 images.

ReCap Pro, you can now export panoramic images of those structured scans. So a structured scan is-- think of it as that stationary terrestrial laser scan. So you set up the scanner in one location, move it to another location, do another scan, that's a structured scan, versus something like a drone flight, where it is unstructured. So it's just creating those point clouds from the aerial images.

Project unit setting, setting the default units, historically, ReCap Pro has always been metric based. But you did have the ability to change that. With a new version of ReCap, you can set those default units to imperial if you like, right from the get go, and not even have to worry about making that switch from metric to imperial.

There have been some stability improvements when it comes to indexing, importing, and registry, registering scans, so making that process easier, less crashing the system, along with performance improvements of regions and project optimization. So if you have a project that has a lot of scan regions, or you delete points, ReCap will optimize those projects, remove those deleted points, any information associated with them, to really give you a better experience when it comes to performance.

So what is the scan to mesh? So basically take your point cloud, clip out any regions you don't want, any areas you don't want, and you could take that area and create a 3D mesh from it. Now, there's a couple of different options you can choose, and we'll go over this in that live demo in just a little bit, but resolution, so low, medium, high cloud credit consumption is based on the quality and the number of points.

So if you set your resolution to high and you've got a high point count, it's going to cost more credits. OBJ and RCA outputs are the two available outputs, and like we discussed earlier, Autodesk Drive and Autodesk Docs to store those files.

So publish, view, annotate, and collaborate, this is really, really cool, really huge improvement when it comes to point clouds and being able to share that information with users who don't necessarily need to have ReCap installed, so they can view all these files in the cloud, make markups, and it basically gets pushed back down to the desktop.

Cloud storage, again, Autodesk Drive, the integration with Autodesk Docs now and BIM 360 provides you unlimited storage. So point clouds, the aerial photos, everything associated with that, if you've ever had to deal with those files, you know that they can be huge. So we're talking gigs and gigs of data, storing those files in the cloud. You don't have to worry about running out of server space.

So let's hop over to that live demo. So looking at ReCap Pro here, so this is just one of those sample projects, that little Techshop that you all may be familiar with. It talked about that scan to mesh process. So I have this file already split out with different scan regions. As you can see as I hover over the different regions, they highlight. I'm just going to turn all of these off.

So what I'm left with is just this little shop table here. So let's say I wanted to mesh an editable mesh of just this object. So I've got my point cloud kind of filtered out, just the points that I want to see. Over on the left hand side here, there's this little cloud icon. And right next to it is mesh. Just hit that Start button. It's going to gather that data. And you can see, I can give it a name. I can specify a cloud location.

So I can upload this to Autodesk construction Cloud, the different qualities, so low, medium, and high, object, the OBJ file, the RCM, the mesh file, and how many cloud credits it's going to cost. And also you can see just approximately how much time it's going to take. And that's really all there is to this process.

Once you have your file in here, I've already got one called Shop Table, so I'm just going to call this one Shop Table 2. Once you have these settings checked off here, the ones that you want to create, just hit Submit, and it's going to upload that data to the cloud and approximately in an hour, that file will be ready to download.

Now you may be asking yourself, how did I go about isolating? So I want to take a look at that, because that's going to come into play a little bit later on. We start talking about optimizing the point clouds. So there's a really cool feature in here called plain. And let me click on this. It prompts us to pick some points.

And when we do, when we hit Enter, it isolates those points sort of on an average basis along the average of those points that were selected. So from here, I can take these points and add them to a new region. So I've got, like I said, I've already got some four walls, columns, floors. But this is a great way to go about sort of breaking down your point clouds into more editable files.

So for example, I'll just throw these on the Region 7. And you see I now have this Region 7 over here, which I can toggle on or off. And this is going to come into play when we start optimizing these point clouds, which we'll get into in just a bit. But before we do, I want to dig into publishing, viewing, annotating, and collaborating in the cloud.

So we can take this entire point cloud and publish this up to Autodesk, Autodesk Docs, or Autodesk Drive. And what you'll see with that is when it's done-- I'll just hop over here-- is we get that 3D view, so that those mirrorball type views that you would see in ReCap, we get those same views in Autodesk Docs here.

So looking at the point cloud in this 3D view, we can then do add annotations, dimensions, little markups, add images. So for example, if I Zoom in on this dustpan, I've got a note here. If I click on that, it says dustpan, and I want to upgrade that to this particular dustpan. So you can add images to that and collaborate with users back on the desktop side.

So looking back at ReCap here, I hop into my mirror ball, spin it around, and I believe I have annotations turned off, so I'm going to turn those on. So there's that same annotation, that same note, and that same graphic, so great way to share information back and forth with users, again, who don't necessarily need to have ReCap Pro installed. They can do that directly from the Autodesk Docs or construction cloud project.

Now sort of jumping back to the mesh thing real quick, I mentioned structured scans and unstructured scans earlier. So when we take a look at that shop table, so that shop table created a mesh from that, but what exactly does that look like? Over in ReCap photo, so there's that mesh of that shop table created from those points. And you see that there are some gaps in here.

So these gaps are because of where the scanner was set up. It wasn't able to capture all the different points at the different angles. So keep that in mind when you're creating your scans. The more scans you have, the more views, the more angles you have of that space, the better the output is going to be when it comes to creating that mesh.

So this is from a structured scan. So you've got those mirror balls, which are the individual terrestrial laser scan setups moved around the space. And what about an unstructured scan? What happens when you want to create a mesh file from something like a drone flight, for example.

So I've got a project here, which was this point cloud was created from a drone. And I've got a few or a couple of regions here. So I've clipped out, basically, all the surrounding ground and just want to keep this tower here. And I want to create a mesh of this. So what's going to happen? Because it's not a structured scan, it doesn't have those mirror balls.

Essentially what you're going to get in return is something that represents more like a clay model. So it doesn't have the underlying 360 photos associated with it. So it doesn't really know how to process the color. So in that case with the drone flights, those unstructured scans, we're going to get something that looks like, basically, a gray clay model of that point cloud.

So that's scan to mesh, as well as the published view annotate, being able to add those notes, being able to push that information back to ReCap pro and vise versa.

Let's take a look at optimizing the point clouds. So we talked about those scan regions. So why would you want to do the scan regions? You want to do the scan regions because that's going to help the point cloud performance when you pull it into other applications, so again, being able to isolate the floors, the walls, columns, things like that, remove some of that excess noise.

Maybe someone walked past the scanner, so you have a bunch of points from that, being able to isolate those files and then split each of those out to a unified point cloud. So what exactly is a unified point cloud? A unified point cloud is basically taking all of those scans, all those individual scan setups, the terrestrial scans, and just basically binding everything together, so creating a single file from multiple scans.

That's going to result in an overall smaller file size, especially when you take into consideration what we call decimating that point cloud, so basically removing some of the points from the point cloud. So what you want to try to do is find that sweet spot between the file size and the visual fidelity, and you'll see exactly what I mean in just a moment.

But so the example you're going to see is the starting file size is just over a gig. And it can consist of 13 different files altogether. But when I decimated that point cloud, it created a unified scan, that RCS file, it took that 1 gig file just by decimating it, setting the spacing to 25 millimeters, it took it from 1 gig just over 20 megs.

And at 50 millimeters decimation took it down to 4 and 1/2, and you can see 90 just under 1 and 1/2 megs. But what does that look like? What is that end result? So here is that undecimated point cloud. This happens to be in AutoCAD '22. So you can see the visual fidelity is really great. There's a lot of points there. But it's also just over a gig. And there are a lot of points.

So you're going to have to take that into consideration. AutoCAD, Revit, whatever application you pull this into, it's going to need to be able to process all these points as you spin the model around, as you slice it and look at it in different ways. But what if we were to decimate this by 25 millimeters? So here's that same point cloud just over 20 megs. The visual fidelity is still really, really good.

It's a much, much smaller file, which will result in better performance within the application. There's 50 millimeters, and there's 90, which is pretty much unusable at that point. But just kind of flipping back, you can see that progression of the decimation from 1 gig 20 megs to 4 and 1/2, so again, trying to find that sweet spot. And I've always found the 25 millimeters to be that ideal spot between the file size and the visual fidelity.

So how can you actually use these files? so you can take the point clouds, once you've decimated them, cleaned them up. Again, maybe you have individual RCS files for the floor, the walls, the piping, the equipment. Being able to toggle those on and off in Revit will make it that much easier to model up existing conditions based on those point clouds.

Likewise in Inventor, the same process applies, being able to isolate the different point clouds, seeing just what you need to see to model what's important to you for that particular project. And then in AutoCAD, what we're looking at here is just a little slice of that Techshop that we just saw a few moments ago. But there's a command called Section Lines in AutoCAD.

And essentially what this does is will attempt to draw some polylines or lines, depending on whatever settings you use, basically interpolating between the points of that point cloud and trying to get the best output. Now the really cool thing about this is you can view the results in a preview mode, so you can make changes if the output is not exactly what you were hoping it would be.

So you don't actually have to get out of that command, delete things, restart it and go through the whole process over again. You just simply just keep cycling through until you find exactly what you're looking for. And for this particular portion of the point cloud, this is the end result, so really, really fast way, really easy way of modeling up some of those existing conditions, so in this case, inside face of walls.

You may be looking at this and saying, what's the deal? Why are there why are there gaps here? This process kind of failed on me. Not really, because you take a look at the point cloud, we can see that there are gaps here. So depending on the settings and the overall size of those gaps, you may be able to compensate for some of that.

But basically, this command did what it's supposed to do. So based on this particular point cloud and these gaps and the settings that were chosen here, that's the output. So you slice up that wall a little bit better, maybe there is a door opening here or garage door bay here or something like that. So you may want to take those things into consideration as well with regards to how you slice that point cloud.

But the end result is something that can save you a ton of time, especially with a larger point cloud. And we can take a look at point clouds in InfraWorks. So this is a portion of New York City. And this is a point cloud pulled off of local state agency website. And from this point cloud, you can generate the terrain quickly and easily just based on those points.

So you get a relatively accurate depiction of the existing conditions without actually having to go out there and laser scan or wait for survey data. If you can access this from, like I said, a state agency website, you can easily pull that information into InfraWorks.

And then likewise in Civil 3D, we can create the ground servers, that ground terrain based on the point cloud. This point cloud you see here is actually classified, so that brown those brown points indicate the ground plane.

So what do you get from that? When the process is all done, you get a really well defined surface from that point cloud with really just a few clicks of the mouse, so again saving you time, saving you effort, which overall, will save you money because you don't have to sit there and do all of this stuff manually.

Just let the power of the cloud processing handle the point clouds, and you're good to go on your way. And with that, I am going to kick it over to Shawn to hear how he and Southern Company are utilizing point clouds in their daily work. Shawn.

SHAWN WEEKLY: Thank you, Matt. So Southern Company, I think I mentioned before, we're a pretty large utility company. You can go to the next slide. And what we're doing is-- currently, what we have today is it takes just too long to get to a substation model in Inventor. We want to use 3D laser scanning with that full photogrammetry and be able to process all that in ReCap and still have a useful model.

So in this next slide, we're going to show a video here. Today what we do-- excuse me. Today what we do is we literally go out, and we take a bunch of pictures, we roll out 2D drawings on our desk, and we try to do estimates and do basic functionality, engineering stuff, off of those pictures and off of the 2D drawings. And that just doesn't make sense for us.

So we've done a scan here of a pretty large transmission substation. I want to say we started off here with a scan that was somewhere in the 800 million point range, and it was like 60 gigabytes. We decimated this down to 20 millimeters and came up with a scan that still, as Matt was saying earlier, the visual fidelity here is still really good. We can still tell what we've got. We can see the structures. We can see the equipment.

We've got all the bubble scans. And I think there was 100 scans in this particular location. And what we've discovered is, it only takes us two days or so to scan a substation of this level of equipment. So we have two days to scan. It's roughly a one to one correlation between the actual scanning and the processing of the scan in the office, give or take a day.

That gives us roughly a week to get a full as built condition survey of our substation. And obviously because we've got this point cloud, and because we've got ReCap, we can actually do the annotations and markups and measurements, which is so much better than what we had before with just some JPEGS and 2D drawings.

We can physically measure and see how big is our span here. We can physically measure and see where our equipments are at. And we can go all the way down into where we're checking clearances on our equipment. We can check clearances on our voltage, high voltage lines in comparison to our fencing and whatnot.

Here I'm going to zoom in to this. I think that's a regulator. Just full disclosure, I'm a technical guy. I'm not an electrical engineer. So most of this equipment, I have no idea what it is. But we can look at this, what I think is a regulator, and I can make sure that the clearance from that foundation is good, assuming this was, perhaps, an old Brownfield or something that we want to do some retrofit work at to see if I have a piece of equipment of this size, do I have enough clearance to put a bigger piece of equipment in there?

But I have my annotations. This is in ReCap currently. And then I'm going to go into my actual real views and look. And I was extraordinarily impressed with the visual aspect and the clarity of the pictures that we get from our scanners. The digital cameras we send the engineers to the field with today, they don't even come close to the fidelity that we have here.

And as I'm rolling around, you can kind of see our scanner there, the picture on the tripod. That just shows you the equipment that we're using. But this is, as I said, this is a really large 500 KV station outside of a hydro plant. And we clipped out all the stuff that doesn't matter to us here.

And then we can jump in between scans. And once again, this is still in ReCap, so we can jump around. And if you have ReCap on your disk, you can obviously look and use the scan in the real view. From the real view, we can still see the annotations. So I can see, that's the diameter of that piece of equipment. I still get all of that goodness, and all of my annotations follow me.

And this is just something, like I was saying before, with some JPEGS and some 2D AutoCAD drawings, we just didn't get this before. And so this takes us so much farther into something that's useful to us. There's just simply no reason not to go.

So some of the other annotations that we'd like to put in there, you can jump to an annotation. So I've kind of highlighted some of the particular information on a piece of equipment that would be of importance to my field users and stuff that they would like to do, so they can zoom in there and use it.

Now here in a second, we're going to go back out of here. And I believe that we're going to go ahead and publish this out. And I'm going to publish it up to my Autodesk cloud drive. And it obviously takes a little bit longer than what we're going to show here. There's some camera magic in this video that goes on. But I'm going to push it up to Autodesk drive, because this really is the killer feature for utilities.

It's the fact that I can publish this out to the web, and in a few minutes after it processes through and uses BIM-- excuse me, the Desktop Connector for BIM 360, it pushes out to Autodesk drive as well. After a few minutes of processing, I have this available for my field folks to use, which is extraordinary.

I'm going to go ahead and show you here the mesh. The initial mesh I tried to push with the decimated cloud here was going to cost me 20 cloud credits, which almost made me have a stroke, because I don't have nearly the cloud credits that Matt does. But once we decimated it down to the 20 millimeters, it only cost me $1.

So I'm going to go ahead and push that out and get my RCM and my OBJ. I will save that again to my drive and then make that useful for future stuff, like putting it in Navisworks or InfraWorks to do some analysis that way.

So here I am, and the important thing to node here is that we are in a browser at this point. I'm in an internet browser. I could be somebody in the field on an iPad or whatnot, and they can pull up this information and use it in hand. And this is huge for us.

So all of those annotations that we made in ReCap, I can jump straight back over to them and see them, once again, still in a browser. I can still get my information. I still have the same visual acuity that I had before. This is all beautiful stuff for us. And it's useful to me right now. It's not something that I have to call an engineer and have them create a model for me or whatnot. It's just here, available to me for use.

And this is just something that we haven't had before. So here's that clearance check in between our regulator or old style transformer here to make sure that we get clearance. And as we roll around, we can see all my bubble scans and everything's still available to me.

Then I'm going to jump over here to this scan, and that's a gas circuit breaker that we're going to look at. And I'm going to simulate kind of what we envision a field user would do. So in this case, maybe we're saying, we've got this breaker. We're going to do a breaker replacement, or we're going to replace this set of equipment here.

And so I'm going to say, all right, I'm a field guy. I want to replace this stuff. So I'm just going to highlight it here. And once again, I'm still using my browser here. So I'm just going to double click on my annotation, and I'm going to say, I want to do something here. And then we can add some information here. Obviously this is just a demo. But I'm going to go ahead and pull in a picture from my machine.

And I want to say, I want to replace these three things with those three things, and that's the picture, a thumbnail of some Inventor models that we have. And I want to save it. And so I'm done being a field person at this point. And then once I'm done with my field work, then we're going to go back into ReCap here in just a second and see, after I admire my model here a little bit more, because I really just can't get enough of all this the Visual accuracy that we get here versus what we had.

Back over here, I'm back in ReCap. And that annotation that I made follows me back into ReCap. And so as I'm sitting in my office, or as I'm another engineer sitting in my office, I can see this stuff is here available to me.

And so really this has closed the gap on so many of our engineering processes here at Southern Company that I can't imagine that we would not continue to do this, especially considering that we can get a scan with this level of accuracy in roughly five days. So with that, I'm going to pass it back to Matt. Matt can close us out.

MATT WUNCH: Awesome stuff there, Shawn. I love the comment you made about decimating the point cloud and how it costs 20 cloud credits for the undecimated, and then when you broke it down to 20 millimeter decimation, only cost you one, so another great another great reason to decimate those point clouds.

Most likely, you're not going to need all of those points, so really just kind of strip it down to what you do need, again, finding that sweet spot between point cloud size, visual fidelity, as well as the number of cloud credits that are going to be required for that process, so excellent stuff, and I think your presentation, your portion, was much more impactful than mine, just because it's more real world, versus what I showed with the little dustpan image there.

You're showing something real world that you guys are actually working on, versus that sample model that comes with ReCap. So thank you so much for that, Shawn, really appreciate it. Thank you all for attending. Hope you found this useful and helpful. Love to hear some of the use cases that you are all doing with this. And with that, we'll see you at the live Q&A. Thank you.