Totally agree. I should qualify that a lot of the work I do is concept design which does not need to be mm perfect, and so this LIDAR scan (IPhone 12 Pro) into Polycam-SketchUp makes site surveys and modelling much faster and cheaper. It isn’t always foolproof and takes some skill to do well. The scanning process can be easily messed up producing some whacky results- but with a bit of practice and learning you can get good repeatable results that for me are very valuable. I should mention the scanning process time for Polycam is very fast, uploading and processing also very fast (between a few minutes to maybe 10-15 for large complex scans) and boom you can then download the files and check before you leave site (highly recommend).
For folk needing very good levels of accuracy old school surveys and drawing from scratch is definitely the way to go. But I would argue for many people it is not a key requirement.
You might want to give it another shot. I use it pretty much every day with highly detailed point clouds, and it’s never crashed for me. The feature extraction is super easy to work with and consistently accurate to the millimetre.
I’ll keep it in mind but at the moment I don’t need it for my workflows. I’ll say this too: the Scan Essentials developers are really great and listen to user feedback and ideas, which means a lot to me.
They’re definitely influenced by it. The newest surface generation and texture from point cloud functionalities are quite good. I don’t think Scan Essentials needs some of the Undet features like pipe centerline or diameter detection (that really leans more towards the Revit folks) or even the reclassification of points.
I really need to make a post in the Scan Essentials forum that details what I would call the “ultimate” version. I keep meaning to but I haven’t organize all of my workflows into a single line of thought and I need that as backup.