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Photogrammetry Startup with the Architecture, Engineering & Construction Collection and Autodesk Construction Cloud

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说明

This class will focus on how to make the most of tools you probably already have access to in Autodesk Architecture, Engineering & Construction Collection and Autodesk Construction Cloud to start processing, analyzing, and maximizing drone photogrammetry data to improve your construction processes. Once at scale, many companies will likely opt for a partner product designed especially for this entire workflow. But it's crucial to get buy-in before making this investment. At BL Harbert International, we found that the best way to accomplish this is by providing concrete examples throughout the company of useful applications on our own projects. To achieve that, we've used several tools already at our disposal in AEC Collection and Autodesk Construction Cloud. This class will step through a workflow of processing imagery in ReCap Photo, then analyzing in either AutoCAD software or Civil 3D software, and finally sharing with stakeholders and making annotations in BIM 360 software or Autodesk Build software.

主要学习内容

  • Learn how to process aerial imagery with ReCap Photo.
  • Learn how to use AutoCAD and Civil 3D tools for mesh, orthophoto, and point cloud analysis.
  • Learn how to use annotation tools in BIM 360 and the hypermodel in Autodesk Build to highlight and share findings with stakeholders.
  • Gain practical advice for starting and scaling a drone program.

讲师

  • Hayes Johnson
    VDC Manager for the BL Harbert International Domestic Division. A mechanical engineer by degree, I have a passion for coordination, quality analysis, and visualization all in 3D. My goal is to continuously seek ways to improve the jobs of our field personnel and other stakeholders through better implementation of these three processes, either through improved workflow or new technology implementation.
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      Transcript

      HAYES JOHNSON: Hi, my name is Hayes Johnson. And this session is Photogrammetry Startup with the AEC Collection and the Autodesk Construction Cloud. So first things first, a little bit about me. I'm our domestic division BIM/VDC manager here at BL Harbert International. So I cover all 3D coordination for all of our domestic jobs, all of our BIM utilization efforts throughout the project lifecycle, 4D schedules, site logistics. Everything BIM-related we cover.

      And we also are starting a reality capture initiative on top of that as well. My background, I'm a mechanical engineer by degree and actually spent the beginning of my career in automotive manufacturing. And there I got a real aptitude for working in the 3D environment. All of our analysis was in 3D. All of our part and model inspection was in 3D. And that really cemented my preference to look at things in 3D.

      And I learned a lot of analysis techniques that have actually led me to look into some of these options that we're going to review today. So it was in manufacturing, but it's kind of pulled over into the construction industry.

      So purpose of this session, this is the only line I'm going to read straight from my PowerPoint presentation. But I developed this to be an inclusive standalone resource for organizations wanting to use Autodesk products to determine how photogrammetry can be utilized to improve current business practices. So to boil that down, when I did this proposal, I thought, what would I want to see a year and a half or so ago when I first got into looking at photogrammetry reality capture?

      I had to boil down a lot of different resources. What is one thing that would have really helped me getting into all of this as one source to get a lot of information and figure out all of the different things that I'm going to need to look into? And so that's the end goal of this presentation is to deliver that. None of it's new. None of it's new information. But I hope it's very encompassing and shows maybe some things that people don't know exist.

      But to achieve these goals, we're going to break it up into three parts. First, I'm going to review some lessons learned just setting up to fly drones and some of the research, and investigation, and setting up that we had to do to get ready to fly in the first place. Then I'm going to work into a technical instruction on going through the actual processes for processing photogrammetry analysis, and then sharing all of that content in an effective way using a Construction Cloud.

      And then finally, I'm going to talk through some more lessons learned on evaluating business cases, and then working with our ops groups, our project teams and management to try and get buy in, and then eventually work towards investment in future products or processes.

      So first things first, building foundations. You've got to go get your imagery before you can do any processing or any analysis for photogrammetry. There is a process required to even get into that in the first place. So first things first, if you're going to be flying drones yourself, you've got to get certified, pretty straightforward. The only caveat I would say here is I would not suggest trying to study yourself. I would definitely suggest using an online study program or in-person study program to do this.

      I studied myself. And it's very time intensive. And there's an overwhelming amount of information that you need to go through to get that certification. But once you do, the next parts are selecting your drone-- so that's your hardware-- and your software, which is going to be whatever application or applications you're going to use to fly the drone. Highly suggest using an automated flight planning application of some sort to plan your mapping, 3D inspection, whatever.

      You can fly manually. But I don't really suggest that. It's not repeatable or reliable enough to make sure you get a good point cloud every time. There are some functions like take a photo every three seconds, for example, in the DJI apps that can be used. But I really suggest going out there and looking at some of the automated flight applications that are available.

      We've looked at several at BL Harbert. Just to rail off a list, Drone Deploy, Pix4D, Hammer Missions, Site Scan by ArcGIS, DJI Ground Station Pro. We've evaluated all of these to see how they can be useful to us. The two we've landed on are Pix4D Capture. It's free. It's fairly simple to use. And it's really easy for our project teams to use.

      We've also used Hammer Missions that I mentioned. It's a little more advanced. There is a monthly cost to it. But it's not tied to a drone services platform necessarily. So it's a low monthly cost. But it allows us to do some more advanced techniques. And I kind of go into that more in my handout. But to get to that point, we looked at several factors regarding these different applications, what those applications are compatible with in the first place.

      Most are compatible with DJI. Those are the most popular. Some exemptions are Pix4D is also compatible with Parrot. And Drone Deploy is also compatible with Skydio 2. But other drones out there, like Autel, have their own robust flight applications. But they might be outside of your price range. They're a little bit more expensive, worth it, but a little bit more expensive. And Skydio has its own enterprise application that provides some robust flight planning services. But that's also an additional cost.

      So rolling out of that, what drone is best for your organization? Like I said, DJI is the most popular. So that would seem like the most obvious choice. If you have federal requirements that you're dealing with or security requirements, that may not be an option. So that's something else to consider. They are designed and manufactured in China. But also, currently, the two most popular DJI drones for photogrammetry are the Mavic 2 Pro and the Phantom 4v2.

      And Mavic 2 Pro's actually not in production anymore. And the Phantom 4 is progressively being phased out. So one, the Phantom 4, does that really make sense to invest in at this time if that technology is being phased out? The Mavic 2 isn't in production anymore. How do we even get one?

      To clarify, the Mavic 2 isn't in production anymore because it's been replaced by the Mavic 3. The problem there is DJI hasn't released the software development kit for third party apps to be compatible with it yet. So like I said, this kind of puts you in a pickle. The new technology isn't compatible yet. But the old technology isn't acquirable or may not make sense.

      So there's a balance that you have to figure out of what may be right for you. What we found is the DJI Air 2S is now becoming compatible with third party applications. So that's the one that Harbert is looking into moving forward to purchase and deploy to job sites.

      In addition to I mentioned Site Scan for ArcGIS and DJI Ground Station Pro. Those are both great. Like I said, we evaluated them. But the thing there was that you have to use an iPad with both of those. And we got the Mav mount that allows you to use your iPad with a DJI controller. But we just found that it was too clumsy. Our project managers didn't like using it. And if the person that's flying the drone doesn't like using it, then it doesn't make sense to use it. They just won't.

      So we kind of nixed those options, at least to deploy to job sites. So say you've got all that figured out. You've got a drone. You've got which software you want to use. And now you've got to go and figure out which settings are optimal for your site. I list a bunch here, what elevation, overlap, several others. Basically what we're looking for is, what's the maximum resolution I can get in a reasonable amount of time and with a reasonable amount of batteries?

      You could burn four batteries flying a site and get great resolution. But was that worth the time commitment? Was that worth the investment in the extra batteries, potentially? And the answer may not be yes. You could potentially fly higher, have less overlap, still get a great output that's usable in a faster amount of time. So that's a balance there that you're going to also have to figure out.

      And then finally, once you determine that, getting authorization, picking a site and an application, first of all actually, then getting authorization, coordinating with stakeholders. When I say authorization, I mean is it controlled airspace? Do you need lance authorization? Do you need additional authorization if it's at a school campus or something to go fly there? These are all things you're going to have to figure out, coordinating with weather, and then fitting into your own schedule as well.

      If you're like me, you've got five other things going on. And you may not have five hours to go drive to a job site and fly a drone. So all these factors that you have to take into consideration. If you don't want to go through all that, drone services are another great option. There's probably a drone services provider in your area. Some of these software providers also provide drone services as part of their package. And they'll take care of all of this, except for picking a site and the application. They'll take care of all of the other factors that we just reviewed for you.

      So if you don't want to go the DIY route necessarily, this is always an option. But if you don't have a budget for this, you do need to make sure you go through all of the other steps, if you're doing it yourself, if you don't have a budget to be able to be prepared for this to be successful. So let's say you did go through all the steps, and you're set up, you're ready to go fly, did your flight. You got some imagery. And now you're ready to process and analyze it.

      So first things first, we got to process the imagery in the photogrammetry engine for the AEC collection, which is ReCap Photo. So this video just shows the basic workflow of uploading imagery and then adding ground control points. Adding the imagery is pretty straightforward. You just copy it in.

      What's happening here is-- I'm going to pause real quick-- I've copied pasted ground control points into my project that we collected on the site. So ground control is just collecting established points that you use that you gathered with a GPS Rover, robotic total station, to get known points that you're going to use to align all your imagery. And then I've added those in with names. I'm going to set the coordinate system for those, which is actually latitude and longitude on this one. We pulled those from a separate project and put them in. And it converted it to lat long.

      And now you can see what I'm doing is going into the images that I'm clicking on the center of that ground control point in each of the images that contains it. And what that's going to do is then align all of your imagery to those ground control points once it produces the mesh point cloud, et cetera, that we're going to go over here in a second. You need at least three spread out over your site. More is better to balance out deviation.

      But here what I want to talk through is our outputs. So again, I'm selecting the state plane. But what you see here is I've selected a 3D textured mesh, 3D point cloud, and then orthophoto, and elevation map. We're going to use all of these during the session. So I suggest in general selecting all of those to output. You may not always need a geo tiff, for example. We'll go into that. But it could be helpful to have. And you may not know it.

      So I suggest exporting all of them partly because you do need to use tokens. It says cloud credits here. But Autodesk has actually moved to using the tokens for processing photogrammetry. It's an additional cost. You can find out more information about that in my handout. But you are going to need to purchase those ahead of time.

      So if you don't know if you're going to end up needing an output, you may as well select it, so you don't have to come back, process it again, pay more tokens to use it again. But additionally I also want to say we always output this to an Autodesk Construction Cloud project folder. And you will kind of see why later on in the presentation. But I wanted to clarify that as well.

      So once you get all that set, should be good to go. You hit start. That's going to run in the background. It's going to upload to the cloud and then process for a while. And when it's done, you're going to have this as the result. This is a different project, obviously. But it shows it's more 3D features that show the capability of recap photo.

      What I'm going to start looking at here is there are a few tools. You can export content. You can do some analysis, edit the mesh, retopologize it. I think I said that right. But we're not going to go into those. But I just wanted to make it clear that they are there.

      So now you have your outputs. They're ready to use. What can we start doing with those? The first use case we're going to look at is utilizing AutoCAD for 2D QA/QC and As-builting. So far this has been our best use case at Harbert. We've had a couple of projects in the last year that have post tension cable throughout the deck, lots of penetrations, lots of special reinforcement. And having these images of the deck at least afterwards for reference purposes as to the as-built condition of the deck has been great. We've had a couple of situations where they really come in handy.

      Unfortunately, due to time restrictions, we haven't been as successful as we like to with the QA/QC side. Generally, I mean, getting it done at the last minute before a pour, getting everything in. And so you're getting that flight in at the last minute. You don't really have time for the processing prior to the concrete pour to catch anything, add in sleeves that may be missing, et cetera. So we haven't been able to really utilize it for that.

      There's a couple of ways we can improve on that as a company. But it has been helpful for the as-built purposes. So the ortho-photo or geo tiff that I mentioned in the recap section, what the ortho-photo is is recap creates the mesh. And then it takes an orthogrammic rendering of the photo of the mesh from plan view. And so it basically generates-- it's not really a mosaic. But it kind of comes across as a mosaic of all of the different photos that you took.

      The geo tiff is special in that I think it can be summarized as basically an ortho-photo that also contains the metadata for the actual location of each pixel. So it can be geolocated and put on actual site coordinates. We're not really doing that in this example. But that is a helpful feature that can be leveraged and utilized. So if you uploaded to the Construction Cloud, there is a slight process to extract that ortho-photo.

      So I wanted to show that real quick. Basically, you can't unzip folders from the Desktop Connector for the Autodesk Construction Cloud. So you've got to copy that guy to your desktop, upload it back. I mean, here's the example of one that I'm zooming in and panning around. And it's just an immense amount of detail in one single photo. So it's great for you can take measurements off of this. It's great for seeing all the detail in one single shot.

      So once you have that, we're going to work into the workflow of actually bringing that into AutoCAD and aligning it. So what I want to show there-- I'm going to pause real quick-- is you saw me change the scale of that photo when I brought it in to 1,000. I did that because I'm not an expert on what size pixels need to be in recap photo. You can set the size of the pixels. I always leave it on auto. And whenever I do that, it comes in really teeny tiny in here if you don't change that scale to 1,000.

      But changing that allows you to get it pretty much to the right size that you need it to be. So anyway, after that, going to go through the basic workflow of aligning one corner as your base point then doing the scale and rotate functions. Use the reference options in both of those. And if you don't know what I mean, you can see some more details in my handout.

      But basically, we're just bringing this thing into alignment with our penetration layout here. And as you can tell, I'm using the corners of the formwork, which is admittedly not very accurate. But for our purposes, it's accurate enough without having to go into the extra work of setting out ground control points or setting out other control points on the deck to use to really dial in the accuracy. We don't really care about measuring deviation of penetrations to the inch, or centimeter, or whatever.

      What we're really looking for here are just gross errors. Are the cables not routed anywhere close to where the layout shows they are? Are penetrations missing? Are penetrations completely in the wrong place? You can see here some cables that were not quite in the right location.

      But that's the kind of content we're looking for here. And if that's the case, then using the formwork is definitely close enough. And it really cuts down on the amount of time that you have to spend on each one of these flights and setting it up, and then the time processing and aligning it as well. So another example of what that looks like when it's done.

      This is a complete penetration layout. We got kitchen in here, plumbing, cable, mechanical penetrations, electrical as well. So we can see all of that and see where it's supposed to be in plan versus where it actually ended up. So we're going to look at this same drawing later actually with some markups. So that's 2D QA/QC and as-builting. Now we're going to move into some potential uses for site work analysis.

      And this we're going to do in Civil 3D. Harbert doesn't have a self performed site work group. But regardless, we've still found some use for this for doing some analysis on site work by others. Your output of choice for Civil 3D is going to be the point clouds, the dot RCS. I do want to point out here the one on the left is, as you can tell, just a stockpile. It's a small stockpile from a job, a local job. And before I brought it into Civil 3D, I actually brought the point cloud into ReCap Pro and trimmed out everything that wasn't the stockpile that I wanted to analyze.

      This is going to let me process it faster in here. And it's going to make the results more accurate because you won't have any extraneous data that's not related to the stockpile of interest. So I'm not going to go through that here. But there is, again, some more information in my handout on how that process works.

      So to create the point cloud, again, very straightforward process. Open that RCS file, bring it in. And then there's a function to create a surface from point cloud. And there's some options here, filtering, rendering, et cetera. But it's a pretty straightforward process. It just runs in the background for a while while it creates that surface. And then there you have your completed surface.

      So once we have that surface, the first thing that we're going to do with it is a stockpile analysis. We're just going to calculate the volume of that stockpile. And to do that, we're going to be doing a cut fill analysis with a volume surface in Civil 3D. The workflow for that just looks like this.

      What you need to do first to create that volume surface is create a bottom surface to compare your actual surface to. So we do that by extracting the border of that dirt pile. And then we're going to open-- I'm sorry, not open. We're going to create a surface from that border. And that's going to act as just the bottom cap of this volume.

      So you can see I extracted it, created a surface, and then added that border to define the outside of the surface. And once I've done that, I'll then go create a-- well, first, I'm going to turn my actual surface back on. Once I've done that, I'm going to go create a volume surface between these two. So I'm going to select my base and then my stockpile as the comparison surface as the top, and then create. And again, that's going to run in the background.

      And when it's complete, you'll then see-- scroll over-- and this guy. And you got your cut, your fill, and then your net, which is going to give you your total volume for that stockpile. All right, so on this slide, I'm actually going to show the process to create a surface volume again. We did that with the stockpile. But I want to show this again because what I'm doing differently here is I'm using data shortcuts.

      And I realized that this was incredibly helpful in this to reduce the size of the file. Basically, a data shortcut is an external reference to the surface in another model. So I highly suggest using data shortcuts for as many surfaces as you can, design and actual, and then bring them into your comparison file as external references. Without doing this, it basically just shut my laptop down. But anyway, then you go through the same process to create your surface volume.

      And I use the design is the base and the actual as the comparison. And then as you can see here, it actually created that surface volume down at 0 feet of elevation. That's the datum. Theoretically, if the site was perfect, your surface volume should just be a flat plane at 0 feet because there wouldn't be any deviation. Now, that's not the case. But it is datumed around 0 feet, just to explain why that came in way down there.

      All right, so you've got your surface or your comparison surface now. But we need to add some information to this to make it usable. No one can really tell what's going on just from this teal surface. So I'm going to set the display to color banding. And then I'm going to add custom color banding and a custom scale to this to show how much each area of the surface is positive or negative to design. As you can see here, it doesn't really look right. But as we zoom in, you get a lot more detail in Civil 3D as you zoom around.

      If I were to do this process again, next time I do this process really, I want to spend more time smoothing and simplifying my surface because as you can tell here, it's really choppy. There's a lot of triangles from where it created the actual surface from the point cloud. And it makes it really kind of hard to see from a large scale view what's going on until you zoom in. And there's a lot of edge. There's lot of detail when you print this too. So to cut down on that, I need to spend more time simplifying the surface next time around. But for now, it's usable.

      So the result after all of that, I've made a couple of other changes here. I've changed the scale again. I've reviewed it with the project team, figured out what exactly they want to see, change the scale accordingly to be more in line with what they need to see. I've added a legend over on the left. It's fairly easy to do. And I've added surface labels.

      There's a default surface label available in Civil 3D. I actually modified that to add design elevation, actual elevation, and then the deviation. There were some owner directed changes, I think, from the design surface based on some conditions that happened during the development of site work, or other direction, or design changes that weren't necessarily reflected in the Civil model. And those produced some areas that look fairly out of tolerance, but in reality aren't.

      So having that extra information of the design surface in the actual saying, OK, this looks bad on the comparison, but it's actually in line with what we need is helpful information to have. And I'm not going to go through that process of how I created those here. But there is more information, again, in my handout.

      So moving on from dirt work. We're going to move into 3D QA/QC and then 4D progress monitoring as well in Navisworks. We had a job down in Perdido Key that the superintendent down there wanted a 4D Schedule or 4D model done of the scan application or the building envelope application. So we broke it down into wall framing the substrate and then the EFIS level as well. So we broke the wall into three parts, and then showed all of those coming in at different instances. Sorry, we also showed windows and the railing as well just so they could track where all work was happening, make sure we weren't trying to install windows in an area where wall framing wasn't done, or other potential issues with the scheduling like that.

      We did find a few things. But then we also realized, well, we have this now. Why don't we see what we can do with tracking it in 4D by bringing in the point cloud. But first things first, like I said, we're going to be using point clouds again, the 3D QA/QC portion. Just like in 2D, we're really looking at large scale things here using the photogrammetry point cloud. You're not going to be able to see steel deflection or concrete flatness from this. It's just not that reliable enough.

      You're looking more at wall locations, window locations, columns, stairs, mechanical equipment, large scale things like that are fairly easy to notice that's not where that's supposed to be that maybe you just haven't caught from having it on the ground looking at it. But fortunately, we never actually found anything like that on this job, except for one. But that was mechanical equipment on the roof that wasn't installed in the right location. I just happened to find that in person first.

      This would have caught that. But we didn't get to that point yet. So anyway, moving on to the 4D. So what I'm doing here is just adding the point cloud to a new activity in our 4D schedule. And I'm setting the completion date way before the date in question that we want to look at. And what I'm then doing is advancing. I'm actually advancing past that date to kind of enhance the discrepancy between plan and actual.

      And as you can see, there's some content missing where it shows in the 4D that we shouldn't be installing windows or walls there. As you can see in the point cloud, they're not there yet. They don't exist yet. And just FYI, the substrate is blue, so that's why you're seeing some of the walls as blue, in case anyone was wondering.

      Takeaways on this, so like I said, the point of 4D for this job was to look at the skin application. And we had to break the walls down into multiple layers. And turns out when we do that, it's really hard to see. The first iteration where wall framing is supposed to be coming up, you can see we should be on framing here and we're not. But then after that, it gets really hard to tell where the discrepancy is between plan and actual.

      You have substrate coming in. But in the point cloud you can see something there. But with the point cloud overlaid on top of the wall panel, it's not necessarily easy to see, all right, what layer am I looking at here? What is actually completed? At least not for our project team. You really have to get in there, zoom around, spin it around. And what they ended up finding easier was just pull up the 2D image from the drone and compare it to the 4D. And that tells you right away where you are versus where you need to be. It's just a lot easier to look at.

      And then the other half of that is you really need a really good point cloud to be able to see that much detail. You could use a mesh as well in this actually. I haven't really gone into that. You could use a mesh. But that never really turned out to be good enough quality either. But our pilot on-site was the project manager. He's the only one with a part 107. And being a project manager, he doesn't have that much time to devote to flying the drone. When he did have time, it was generally raining because it's at the beach. Or the tower crane was active during that time. And he didn't have chances to come in on the weekend, or stay after hours, or whatnot to get these flights in.

      So trying to work around that, he was never able to get enough good shots to make a good point cloud. The one that you saw actually I went down to site and did as a test. So that was kind of-- we need some more staffing on that job ideally to make it really successful. But that would be overkill for the job. It's not that large of a project. What we were trying to do just wasn't really necessary for the size of the job. So they didn't have the resources to get extra manpower down there or to have someone come in after hours or on the weekend to do this. It just wasn't there.

      And the results weren't really necessary to the size of the job either. It wasn't something that they needed to have due to the complexity of the job. So this one, it didn't end up being successful in this job. And we took it more as lessons learned and moved on. But another use case we've been looking at is logistics planning. We haven't done anything with this yet. We haven't had a chance to or any opportunities. It is something we're going to pursue this fall.

      So I'm not going to go too much into this. But I did want to review that the options available for this in the AEC collection or Formit, Infraworks. You can bring point clouds or meshes into both of those. Navisworks is always an option too, obviously. I think Formit and Infraworks probably are a little more powerful. For site logistics in the past, we've used Infraworks. We just haven't brought any photogrammetry into it yet.

      But I provide some links to this in my handout. But I wasn't going to go any deeper in this presentation. So we went through four use cases. You've created some content. You've got some deliverables. And now you need to share it. More than likely, you're remote from your project team or whoever you're working with. So just having somebody look at something on your computer is definitely not an option. You're going to need to share online somewhere.

      So that's where the Construction Cloud comes in. I'm going to break this up in the two parts, 2D options and 3D options. The 2D markups and issues, Autodesk Construction Cloud is kind of built on the acquisition of plan grid. So plan grid really shined when it came to 2D markups and issues, or whatever they called issues in plan grid. So that rolls over directly into Autodesk Construction Cloud. And it has a lot of power and options.

      So this is just walking through the process of making some markups and adding an issue. This is our Charleston job. And we actually had a design change after we poured this deck. And so what we're looking at here is some proposed new penetration locations that the design team sent over. I overlaid those. And now we're checking to make sure we're not going to have any problems with those.

      And here I'm just adding, can we move these penetrations for this toilet into the wall where we actually put penetrations in the deck? And so I didn't really go through it there, but there are options-- oh, there you can see-- to add RFIs, photos, documents. You can link to the drawing sheets. You can link to assets. What I think would help here is if we attach more photos close up photos on the deck of the actual penetrations potentially to show where they are.

      Or on some of these other items where we're not exactly sure if there's going to be an issue or not, I could drop an issue next to them and then make that a to-do item for someone out in the field. Hey, does anybody have any closer up photos of this that we could tag in here to show what it's going to look like, any photos of this area? So those are all options for using the built-in functions and issues and markups with this content that you pull from AutoCAD.

      Here's just another example of a fully marked up sheet. I've got five issues on here and then a few markups. This is actually in BIM 360. It works the same way pretty much, but all the same functionality in there. All right, so 3D content, Autodesk Construction Cloud handles a whole laundry list of 3D file types. And that includes all of the outputs that we produced from ReCap. Mesh model, point cloud-- well, the geo tiff we just looked at actually-- are all visible in here.

      So first, we're just going to look at the point cloud and mesh options. Point cloud loads through the recap online viewer actually. So you can come in, see more detail, share this with your project team if they just want to see what exactly that point cloud looks like. You can take measurements in here. And you can add notes. Now, notes don't translate to issues. But you can add them, share them with the recap desktop app and with other members on Construction Cloud.

      Now, the mesh-- and I want to pause right here-- the mesh is actually going to be the dot FBX model that you bring in. And when you bring that in, I highly suggest you turn off display lines and you turn off display edges. As you can see, kind of what's going on in the background is there are breaks at all of the tiles where it's rendering the surface. So adding that it's going to make it look way more congruent and cleaner, make it look more like it did in recap photo.

      But again, this is same thing, zoom in, see more detail. You can take measurements. But again, unfortunately, there's no support for issues in here. So we're kind of limited on what all we can do. You can create section planes though if you want to get a profile of a surface. So there are a few helpful tools in the online viewer.

      The last bit of 3D content that you can pull in is you can actually pull in the tin surface from Civil 3D. And this actually supports issues. What I'm doing here is I'm just creating an example issue on that surface that was in Civil 3D. I do want to clarify that this is the design surface. I need to do some more work, as I said earlier, on simplifying the actual surface in the comparison.

      There is an option to publish surface to the cloud from Civil 3D. But you need to take steps to reduce the file size before you do it. It will not publish large surfaces. So I'm still working through that in all honesty. But there is potential to take that comparison surface, put it up here, and then add issues within the 3D viewer to review with your team.

      So we're going to circle back to the FBX models though real quick because one of the functions that is available on FBX models is the hypermodel functionality in the Autodesk Construction Cloud. And this basically allows you to replicate the 2D overlay that we did in AutoCAD solely within Autodesk Construction Cloud instead. So I want to show what that looks like because I want to show how much easier I think it is to align the surface in here than it was in AutoCAD.

      So first things first, you do need a control surface of some sort to align your drawing to. So you've got to have a flat surface preferably raised from your concrete deck here to place that drawing on. If you don't have that, this isn't going to work. And it needs to at least be mostly flat. But once you do that, you just select two points in the drawing and two points in the model. And it's going to scale and rotate at the same time.

      So I think it's way fewer clicks. It's done in the browser. So anybody can do it. You don't have to have AutoCAD to be able to do this. But just again, the only problem is there's no issues functionality on the FBX model. So we can't create issues directly here once this is done. So that's kind of been our holding point for not utilizing this more at Harbert. But there is a potential workflow that's using the 2D, 3D flip back features.

      So you see that drawing after it's aligned on the left. What I can do is actually zoom in on an issue I found. Like that sleeve isn't in the right location. I can go click on that drawing in the left. And it takes me straight to it. And there I can add an issue in my markups on the drawing instead. Now, again, this is a little clunky because you can't add it directly to the overlay. But it does give you an option to do the overlay in the cloud and then utilize the issues functionality in the same place.

      And so you can see I'm creating that. And then once I'm done and I've published that markup, you could then go down to view in 3D. And it's going to take you directly back to the mesh model to view the overlay. And I can zoom in on the issue again. So maybe useful. Another potential is to create the overlay in AutoCAD and then align that overlay to your FBX model if you need to see more detail in 3D than you can see from 2D.

      So any 2D document can be aligned to a model using the hypermodel functionality. So I've covered a lot. We covered the setup before you even need to start taking photos. I've covered a lot of technical instruction on working through various softwares. But getting into this, there are also some keys that I want to review in actually approaching project teams and starting up, the actual keys to starting this thing up.

      So like I said, three keys. The first one that's been important to us is seizing opportunities. The project teams aren't going to come to us thinking they need this information. So you really need to go to them, explain to them what the potential benefits can be. And generally in our experience, you really just got to bug people. They're busy on a million other different things. They don't really know what you're talking about. But if you can explain to them, I want this opportunity. I think it's going to help your job, just see what I can do with it. And if you deliver and they do find value in it, they're going to want it from then on.

      But it's going to take some going to the people and grabbing those opportunities. Also, Harbert, we work in a diverse group of projects. We have commercial, industrial, federal. Seems like everything that we do is slightly different than the last one. And so for example, we don't have a lot of these post tension jobs that come up all the time. So we really had to seize the opportunity to work on the two that we did to find value in doing this process on those.

      Now we know when this comes up in the future, hey, we can use this again. But if we hadn't seized the opportunity and discovered it on these two, I don't know when we might have the next opportunity. So we really have to go after things as they come up. So that involves talking with people, talking with your ops teams about schedules, talking with precon and what's coming down the pipe, just communicating. Communicating is the biggest thing that I'm really going to stress here.

      And secondly is we talked about this in the 3D QA/QC, but find what works for you. All contractors are a little different. And so you really need to determine what works best specifically for your organization. What works for us may not work for you, vise versa. We've found that two of our three applications that we reviewed today are successful. The third one we need to reevaluate, maybe try a different way in the future. But we're not going to continue to pursue and push the technology for the sake of the technology. Like I said, on that side, it is a tool. And it needs to be a tool that is helpful not that is forced on people.

      So if you try something and it doesn't work out, learn from it and then try to move on to the next use case or consolidate. It may be that there's five things you try. Two have worked. And you're really good at those. And you find a lot of use out of those. So don't try and do everything, but really find what works specifically for you.

      And then lastly, you've got to share the right content with the right people. So we found that using content from our own projects really helps prove the usefulness of this and helps get buy-in from different individuals. If I show a project team content from their own project, they're going to understand, OK, this doesn't just work on that theoretical job in the demo. This actually works right here. And it's helping me. And then when I can show that, I can show management, look at how it's helping them. They're bought in. They want to go for it. Should work next time around. Let's go for-- we're going to talk about this on the next slide. Let's go for investing more resources into this opportunity.

      But some other keys are make sure you share the content in a way that's visible to everyone critical. So Construction Cloud, that's the best place to share with all your stakeholders. Show the data in a way that's usable. The hypermodel is great. But the 2D PDFs while not nearly as cool are actually more usable for our project team. The site deviation data needs to have some features added to it, so that the end stakeholders can tell what's going on there.

      They can't just look at the model and take measurements off of it. I still got to produce 2D content for them. So make sure you make something that's usable by people. And lastly, quantify and explain in basic terms what the benefits are. So it's going to save this much money. It's going to save this much time. It's going to give us much better data than this other option. It's going to give us data that we never had before. And this is how we can use it.

      I don't think I'm the first to say that quantifying this is the most important. One thing that we have found really important in this process, though, is accurately tracking time that you spend on working on this. So let's say for our Charleston job, over the course of five months, I'll track every time I work on doing photogrammetry alignments for them. And then I can come back down the line and say, all right, well, I spent 20 hours over that course of time doing this. Whereas, it would have taken this much time out in the field with the field engineers to do this.

      Or you can use that for investment purposes down the road. Took me 20 hours to do it this way. But if we invest in this, I could have done all of that in four hours or so and so could have additionally helped on it. It's just really important to track everything that you're working on going through in this process. So let's say that you started up and now you found success, which you should because there is real value in using photogrammetry if used correctly.

      But what are the next steps once you've got it started up, you've gotten buy-in, and now you want to start growing and scaling? So I see two options honestly, in terms of software. One is to continue using the AEC collection and Construction Cloud, like we reviewed here. It's probably little to no additional cost for software. But you will incur some cost in either hardware and/or hardware and manpower just to be able to use those tools.

      I skipped a lot of time. But some of those tools are very time intensive, especially on a standard laptop or even a laptop with a dedicated graphics card. So if you're really going to invest in doing it that way, you'll probably want to invest in better hardware or more manpower to spread out the workload. The other option is to use a third party photogrammetry platform. Maybe that's not the right terminology, but like Drone Deploy or Pix4D are the two that I keep going back to. Those are going to be additional costs for the software.

      But the user interface is purpose built for photogrammetry purposes. All the pics and clicks, there's generally fewer. They're more user friendly. It's not trying to do a million things, like Civil 3D is or AutoCAD is. Its purpose built for these applications. And so it's just cleaner and easier to use. It's also browser based. So you don't have to have special hardware or special software installed to be able to use it.

      So what we're talking about here is being able to democratize the efforts across a more diverse group of personnel in your organization. And so yeah, there's an additional cost for that software. But it's probably going to potentially pay off. And different sized organizations may prefer different options here. Or the number of jobs that you're going to use photogrammetry on may drive this decision. So there's a lot of factors that go into it.

      But either way, you're probably going to end up having to make an investment at some point to make this successful to scale. And so to do that, that's the entire point of this presentation was to walk through all the steps the start up, to get buy-in, so you can get prepared for that investment to scale your efforts. And so once you get it, you're going to give your project teams more support that they may not now know they need and allow you to win more business, make all of your jobs, hopefully, more profitable by using these techniques. So that's all I have for today. Thank you.