Imagine a connect-the-dots puzzle made of millions of dots (and in three dimensions). Now, imagine that getting the puzzle wrong might cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.
Until recently, that was the situation for architects and engineers performing point cloud scans of industrial spaces. They had to manually connect the dots of their scans while ensuring that the measurements were correct down to the millimeter, or risk providing a model that might cause their employers to make a costly mistake. The rise of partly or fully automated software to deal with the tedious mess of transforming a point cloud into a 3D CAD scan has made life far easier for industry professionals.
Brian Christiano, owner of BC Engineering and Design LLC, is one such professional. Christiano has a storied past, working as an engineer, an adjunct professor of nuclear and mechanical engineering, and a submarine officer for the U.S. Navy. These days, he works above the waterline, offering building information modeling (BIM), scanning, and visualization data of spaces to institutions like the commercial nuclear arena and the U.S. Department of Defense. But Christiano’s most popular service is laser scanning, offering 3D models of spaces.
A FARO Laser Scanner, much like the one Christiano uses in his practice. While this scanner is designed to scan interiors, others are designed to scan the properties of objects. (Image courtesy of Position Partners.)
He went into the field almost by…