3D terrain scanning/point cloud import
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Hello folks.
I think I'm a bit behind the times with how I do my land surveys for domestic gardens as I currently just use a Moasure, but I'd like to scan sites using a drone to create a 3D file that I can import in to Sketchup Pro - does anyone know where I should begin? I'm not sure what hardware or software I need, the only one I've seen work with Revit only and involves lots of other steps before you can import it. I've previously scanned a small area by hand using an ipad which then allowed me to import it directly into Sketchup, but I'm starting to be more involved in gardens covering an acre or two so I want to make it as efficient as possible.All guidance welcomed because I'm cluelss 🫤
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Have you looked at Reality Scan?
RealityScan | 3D models from images and laser scans
3D models from images and laser scans
RealityScan (www.realityscan.com)
That's where I would start as its free to use if your business in under the $1 million USD in revenue per year.
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@Rich-O-Brien Thanks for the info, that's completely new to me. It seems like a very capable software and looks like it offers way more than I require as I just need a glTF binary file (.glb) of a texture mapped terrain to use as my starting point in sketchup.
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Update: It seems like Sketchup just isn't able to cope with this kind of input due to only using a single processor core, even a 3.6gb .obj was too much for it. I've been on various forums and it seems people use either Rhino, Blender or Revit - I was thinking of getting Blender and importing the .obj into there and exporting it as a .glb to see if that worked, but I'm rapidly losing hope. I tried using Thomthom's Quadfacetools extension to import the .obj, but after 8 hours still nothing had happened.
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3.6gb mesh is a lot to handle for many apps. But SketchUp is not meant to be a platform for such a use case.
I'd import that into Blender and try using either a Decimate or Remesh modifier to reduce the point count to get something usable in SketchUp.
You also may have many duplicate points in that mesh which would cause chaos in SketchUp so some cleaning would be needed in that area too.
Download the free D'oh Book for SketchUp 📖
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@Rich-O-Brien said in 3D terrain scanning/point cloud import:
3.6gb mesh is a lot to handle for many apps. But SketchUp is not meant to be a platform for such a use case.
I'd import that into Blender and try using either a Decimate or Remesh modifier to reduce the point count to get something usable in SketchUp.
You also may have many duplicate points in that mesh which would cause chaos in SketchUp so some cleaning would be needed in that area too.
I tried importing a 64,000kb monochrome .dae into Sketchup and that was completed within 30 seconds or so, but working with it was pretty much impossible. I tried running both a cleanup and converting triangular mesh to quad, but both failed.
I've previously imported a small 3D scan of a room complete with textures as a .glb from an ipad and that worked great, but anything beyond that is a world of pain.
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