Hi Does any one know of an app for the iPhone capable of accurately scanning a room in 3D and exporting to SketchUp ? I have found topics on this but dated 2020 thanks
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The issue isn’t really the scanning app, there are plenty of decent apps.
the issue is the complexity of geometry that is created an SketchUp. SU doesn’t handle large poly models too well. A Lidar scanning app will create a room model that is likely millions of verts.
You can obviously set some apps to do low poly scans but you are losing detail at source particularly if the room contains lots of furniture and items. Depends on what you are trying to achieve.
Canvas by Occipital, which I used for years, offer a scan-to-cad service that will process your scans into SketchUp models but I found that there were too many introduced errors, the source scans are very accurate so I ended up just using the scans as measurement reference material alongside my usual measured survey. Now that my iPad has Lidar I don’t use canvas anymore, I use an app unoriginally called 3D Scanner App. It’s very accurate, can set to low or high res scans, set texture resolutions, simplification options, export in many formats, plane detection for planar measurements and can even export floorplans based on a section height in vector or raster formats.
Again, depends on what you are trying to achieve. I would probably check out Canvas as I would imagine the service is better than when I was using it, Occipital now claim that accuracy is within 1 - 2 % of a laser measure, so that’s pretty good. I also noticed that the turnaround times are longer, so that may indicate there are more humans in the loop than previously, you can also send them ‘measured critical dimensions’ that will override the processing algorithms, so again my guess is that they understand the hurdles.
I still only use the scans so I can ‘capture everything’ as reference for additional measurements alongside my main survey software which is MagicPlan on my iPad (its 
)
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Define ‘accurately’ - there are several apps but the inaccuracy is about 1% and that inaccuracy is everywhere in the model - its not a linear inaccuracy.
I did a few tests but for now - I only use the 3d scans for global reference / fun / research. It still takes too much time to create an accurate and abstract 3d model for now using lidar scans (using an ipad pro and manually creating a 3d model from the high rez scan)
First test I tried scanning a project, taking a few laser reference measures as well and scaling the 3d scan to those measures. The high rez model had too much inaccuracies to use for my work (Architect) and SketchUp didn’t like the high polycount (Blender did).
Second test was to import the scan into Blender and make an abstract 3d model in Blender using the laser measurements. Next you can bake the texture of the 3d scan onto the faces of the Blender model and then you have a low rez textured model that can be used in SketchUp without any problem. This takes too much time for now because I’m not that experienced modelling in Blender (yet).
So for now - I wait until the accuracy of the lidar apps is improved (and I find the time to get better at modelling in Blender).
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