Well it is done....for now. Here is the basic synopsis of the entire project.
A polypropylene plant is going to be moved, yes the entire plant, to Azerbaijan, had to look that one up. (bought and paid for by the "president" of the country, apparently he is president by self election since he literally owns most of the country) The project is for an Israeli company who is actually doing the work under the supervision of an Italian engineering company who then selected an american company(really the owner is Slovakian, but who really keeping tally at this point) to do the laser scanning and as much documentation/inventory as possible in the given time frame(two weeks to be precise). You can't make this up!!
On my end I ran a baseline traverse around the plant to establish control and set targets on equipment, columns and whatever else I could stick the targets too. After that it was just a matter of scanning everything. In all I think we had 1581 scans over two weeks and the surveying took me, yes I am a one man crew with a traditional total station, about 4 days to get everything located I wanted too. The equipment we used were as follows, Sokkia 3" SetR30 instrument, and two Z+F Laser Scanners, a 5006 and a 5010. here are some pictures of the event. Hope you enjoy them.
Plastics Plant in Varennes
First pulling up to the job and realizing "oh S@#$" its bigger than we thought
Height perspective of the East Tower
survey instrument and wagon
First site after crossing the border.
Our contact guy smoked and we all about fell out when we saw his cigarette carton. They are similar to this but some are much worse. One in particular showed a corpse with an open chest and black lungs. They did not hold back from showing the gruesome in Canada. Probably has something to do with government healthcare and all.
In all I thought it was a very nice place. Montreal had some good food. Must try poutine and go the Saint Lawrence street. We were looking for a particular restaurant and there was a porn cinema, which I thought was odd, but they had scenes from the movie posted outside on the cover with no stars or black bars covering anything. I definetely knew we were not in the US then. The food was expensive but never had a bad meal. They don't have dollar bills. They have $1 and $2 coins. Pretty interesting place.
WOW!! 1581 scans!!
That is a lot of point cloud data. And a lot of processing!
Curious how many TB of data we talking for all scans?
Scans
Well each scan is about 160 mb and plus we have pictures. We are not into the terrabytes just yet but we are getting close.
Scans
Glad to hear you had a good trip in "la belle province". The warning labels on cigarettes packs are indeed visual (all across Canada). Word is they want to increase the level of gruesomeness, similarly to a decision recently taken in Australia. Surprisingly, there's quite a bit of smoking still allowed in public places, bars, restaurants in the province of Québec, when compared to the other provinces and territories.
Project wise, this is quite something, your scanning work. Thank you for the pictures. A lot of data processing. I am curious on how the filtering of background/noisy data is done. Is the filtering controlled by the software or the user? Scanning a wall, I can understand. But 10,000 pieces of pipes, I am clueless.
The information from scanning work will certainly be useful for the crowd on the other side who will put back the plant together.
Scans
Yes there were several thing we "Americans" had to get used to in Quebec. Gruesome cigarette packs were only one of them. I told my wife we are going to Quebec. There seems to be a real uniqueness to the province, even among Canadian provinces. Really enjoyed myself. All the pretty French Canadians didn't hurt anything either. I like brunettes!!
As far as scanning we don't really control the noise so much as we address that issue at the time we process our scans. So we control it through the software. We have figured out that the newer 5010 scanners do a much better job outside than do the 5006's. They don't look nearly as bleached out as the older scanners produce. The information is the same, but they just do a whole lot better. Here is an example of the older scans.
here is what the typical scan looks like in our software.
