The only thing missing from Scan Essentials is texturing from the point cloud.
I currently have to use both point cloud toolsets: Scan Essentials and Undet. In my opinion, the former is easier to actually model from, but Undet has the ‘Texture from point cloud’ functionality, and I really need that for my workflows. So, alas, I purchase both.
I’ve spoken to the product team and told them it would absolutely be my number one feature request, but I just need to reiterate that - after more models than I care to admit - if Scan Essentials could apply the point cloud RGB values to the surface in the same way as Undet, they’d have an awesome tool on their hands.
It creates meshes relative to the z-axis, but it doesn’t do plane or edge detection like Undet. In my experience, those functions in Undet (as well as in Revit) aren’t that good anyway and I find it’s just easier for me to model the surface manually.
But if you wanted to create a wall using the “create ground mesh” function, you can rotate the point cloud on the x/y axis’ so the wall is like a “ground”, and it’ll do it.
I have not used Scan Essentials recently … because very early on I opted for a 3-year Undet license. But in my opinion another advantage of the Undet toolset over Scan Essentials is Undet’s direct connection to the Undet (Point Cloud) Browser. I find this facility very useful.
Meanwhile, creating meshes directly from the point cloud is oftentimes NOT all that useful for me …because typically my remodeling clients want an “as-built” SketchUp model where everything is orthogonal and/or parallel.
I can imagine if the model is only documenting a building for historical purposes … then “removing” these “imperfections” may not be desirable.
And then there is the whole extension debacle.
Trimble likes to promote extensions. But they don’t like to support them … unless it’s a Trimble extension. Thus, once a facility is rolled out as a Trimble extension … third party extensions (like Undet for modeling from point clouds or Enscape for photorealistic rendering) are ultimately doomed.
Similar to you, I require good orthogonal/parallel objects in my models, but on the other hand one of the main reasons I like being able to texture from the point cloud is I can create a lower-polygon object for those imperfect areas, and have the texture applied so at least the customer can see/review it.
Horses for courses I guess. “Orthogonal” and “as built” seem to be a contradiction in many properties which is why I work from point clouds in the first place. If a wall leans out by 10mm or 100mm my models need to reflect that, the same if a corner is 90.5 or 91 degrees rather than 90 and undet is the tool for that job. Having said that it would be great to find an orthogonal building to work on one day
LOL, my version of that is when people use “digital twin” for a simple 3D model with no real time data.
It reminds me of how often I find myself reminding people “…data ≠ information…”, but we all have to consider the application and it’s objectives to differentiate the two, right? If an imperfection like a wall leaning out by 10mm is due to shoddy workmanship or even decades of settling, but it isn’t structural, it’s pretty immaterial and not the kind of data I’m going to concern my models with. But if a retaining wall is leaning forward by 2° and we’re thinking of building something above it, you bet your butt that is going to be information I’m going to incorporate into my drawings.
Maybe you could try with the “keep known ground data” checkbox on. It will stop filtering the non-ground part of the point cloud.
Note that after seeing this comment, we have worked on a simpler way to mesh walls. The new tool should be available in the near future.
If you cannot wait for it, you can test it following the below link (as well as texturing tool…). It lets you access some beta features we are working on. Some regarding Scan Essentials, others regarding various AI topics.
Hi Yohann, I cant access the the test page, i get this message “The page you are attempting to access is unavailable”.
I did try meshing again with the ‘use known ground data’ checked, but it hasn’t worked correctly, it seems to have pulled ground mesh up the vertical face of the point cloud.
I think its very easy to blame a particular plugin for SketchUp crashes when its often down to our own workflow practices. I have no affiliation whatsoever with Undet other than having used their plugin almost every day for about 8 years, but in my experience it almost never crashes SketchUp. When it does its usually because I opened an existing model direct from the Start-up screen rather than from the file menu which is something you shouldn’t do.
Fair enough. I found it would have a tough time if I reopened a project that had an .las file referenced, sometimes it’d load and sometimes it would crash. I think the largest .las file I had was about 300M points with a density of 1,000 sq. meter that I had classified pretty thoroughly, but Undet just couldn’t do it.
Anyway, I’m really happy that the Scan Essentials team has pulled together both an improved mesh from points functionality AND a texture by points (the only feature I felt was missing, TBH), it’s exactly what I requested a little while back and it has been performing great for me.
I solved that by rotating the cloud with cloudcompare and exporting the cloud again. I suppose that scan essentials uses the normals to detect the ground. If you rotate the cloud in SketchUp normals are not rotated.
It’s even worse than this, the ground mesh did not take the point cloud transformation into account for the mesh computation (only used for final position). Which means that you indeed need to rotate the cloud before importing it in Scan Essentials. Note that this behaviour should also be fixed in the next version.
I’m one that mostly needs to idealize existing conditions for what I do, but given the fabrications you have to make, that’s understandable.
All of this is moot for me as a Mac user, of course. Are there any options for a Mac user. Also, how does Scan to Design on the iPad fit into all this? I’ve only dabbled with it, and I’m sure it’s not accurate enough for what @kevin58 does.
