Junaid Asghar | FARO UK Blog

Jul

2017

FARO Releases ZONE 3D for Public Safety Professionals

FARO are delighted to announce the availability of the new FARO ZONE 3D software. This revolutionary platform, through its advanced smart tools, is the first of its kind to enable investigators to move fluidly between 2D and 3D environments and enhance the quality of incident reconstruction analysis or presentations for public safety professionals.

FARO Zone 3D dramatically elevates the visual impact of presentations, including courtroom exhibits, by enabling accurate 2D and 3D scene diagrams, 3D scene walk-throughs, and full scene reconstruction animations.

FARO Zone 3D also enhances the ability of public safety professionals to plan for, and respond more effectively to, emergencies by creating accurate representations of real-world locations within local communities.

Sacred Scanning Interiors

Toward the end of last summer, after he had finished his scans of Baroque churches in Rome and Turin and was back in his Meyerson Hall office, Andrew Saunders began sending massive batches of data to the cloud. He had scanned the interiors of each sumptuous church from multiple vantages, using a top-of-the-line LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) scanner. At the high-resolution setting he used, each scan comprised about 15 million points, with less than a centimeter separating each point. The trick was to get all the scans to mesh together, without overlaps or gaps.

“We’d send 200 million points to the cloud—up to 90 gigabytes—and two or three days later, we’d get back an email” from Autodesk, a California-based software firm, recalls Saunders, an associate professor of architecture. “One time it has a smiley face and says, ‘Congratulations! Your mesh worked. You can download it.’ Other times, after two days you get a frown face that says, ‘Sorry, it didn’t work.’ It’s really kind of a blind process.”

But once they meshed, he says: “All of a sudden you’re seeing these churches as nobody’s ever seen them before.”

Space may seem infinite, ubiquitous, even timeless.But confine it to the interior of a soaring, wildly complex Baroque

structure—say, Guarini’s Church of San Lorenzo in Turin—and it becomes, in the right hands, with the right technology, something else altogether.

“It’s essentially an argument for space as an object,” says the 42-year-old Saunders, who speaks openly and quickly, with a certain professional dryness. That argument is at the heart of his Baroque Topologies project, which he unveiled at Charles Addams Hall last winter, and which he is now writing up in book form. (Publication details are still being worked out.)

Even the term space, as a component of architecture, is relatively new, he points out. “Frank Lloyd Wright in the ’20s was the first one to really use it. It’s kind of a contemporary concept, and I think it’s continuing to change.”

For those inclined to regard space as an object as gaseous academic theory, consider this: you can, with the right technology, print out the objectified space on a 3D printer. (On a reduced scale, of course, which is a good thing for any building housing that printer.) It’s the equivalent of filling each church to the top with Jell-O, shrinking it down to a tiny fraction of its original size, and removing it. Except that Saunders’ translucent photopolymer resin molds have far more detail and articulation, right down to the non-space that had been occupied by altar cherubs and high-flying angels.

On the computer screen, these digital renderings are protean, morphing at the click of a mouse from solid 3D printouts to

ghostly X-rays to a sort of internal death mask. They are also strange and toothsome eye candy.

The images “force us to see complex buildings with fresh eyes,” says Joseph Connors, a professor of art history and architecture at Harvard who specializes in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque. “Their beauty and their strangeness shock us into new recognitions of buildings we thought were familiar. They reify space, making it into a sculpted substance in which the contained takes on life, even when the enclosing container is peeled away.

The buildings always had a strange beauty, but now they have shock value too,” he adds. “It is as though the familiar bust of Homer on our desk were suddenly replaced by the brain of Homer.” At times, the freshness borders on hallucination. One rendering brings to mind an ornate Japanese robot. Another suggests a rococo decanter. A third, an exquisitely decorated fire hydrant. “It’s something that leaves us curious, excited, and perplexed at the same time,” says Guido Zuliani, an architect who teaches at the Chanin School of Architecture at Cooper Union. “Because it’s all new, and because of the beauty of these things, it may be deceiving, but there is an intellectual chain—in terms of the Baroque, in terms of architectural analysis, and in terms of a different model of understanding an architectural object.”

Unlike Renaissance or Modernist architecture, the Baroque is “so completely complex,” says Saunders. “It has so much articulation. It’s always about blurring thresholds between painting, sculpture, architecture, the city.” In a recent talk, he described the space of Baroque interiors as a “maelstrom of pressure and forces with a paradoxical desire of purely mathematical speculation and religious mysticism bound in a taut envelope.”

Connors paints an eloquent picture of what we perceive when we enter, for example, Bernini’s Sant’ Andrea al Quirinale and gaze upwards: “the dome we see is a fiction of superimposed structures: ribs inside coffers that diminish perspectivally to

expand the surface that covers us.” Saunders’ models, he explains, not only show such vaults “with the clarity of a high-resolution photograph, but they also show the space the dome contains. We have the illusion that we can run our hands over space and feel its contours and inflections.” For Saunders, those “deep, withdrawn, interior spaces are really amazing to study because they’re so cut off from the exterior.”

“They’re just their own sort of worlds,” he adds. “Any kind of light, even natural light, is usually indirect or very far or bouncing back.

You never get a direct view out of them—they’re just kind of deep chasms that you enter into.”

Before traveling to Italy last summer, Saunders flew to Florida for a training session on the FARO Laser Scanner Focus 3D X 130, which can scan at nearly a million points per second and has a range of 130 meters.

“I found that it’s being used mostly in criminology and surveying,” he says. “In architecture and historic preservation, it’s used to look at a very specific piece, not an entire building.”

Had he been forced to buy the scanner, it would have wiped out the entire $50,000 University Research Fund grant he had procured to cover his expenses in Italy. Fortunately, FARO agreed to lend him one for a month, gratis.

Autodesk also allowed him to use, among other things, its ReCap (for Reality Capture) and ReMake software. Without their ability to generate high-resolution meshes, he says, he never would have been able to make the renderings.

“Autodesk has been a huge, huge help,” he adds. “Right now this is a very big realm, not just for Baroque historical analysis—which it is but even for the industry: engineering, architecture. Because they’re trying to figure out how to work with this large amount of data within their typical tools for making construction documents or representation. The stuff that we’re doing wasn’t even possible to do

weeks ago. We’re working with Autodesk and changing the algorithms for how they’re processing all of this stuff.”

Autodesk was thinking mainly of industrial designers and engineers when it started its cloud computing service, he explains. “They’re scanning a lot of infrastructure, oil platforms, things with a huge number of pipes and services, and they want to make sure that what- ever new thing they’re putting in doesn’t collide with anything. So they scan them and make them into meshes, and use them for collision detection. Then all of a sudden 18 Baroque churches start rolling through. And they’re like, What is this stuff? They got really interested.”

Tatjana Dzambazova, Autodesk’s senior product manager and “technology whisperer,” confirms that when she and her colleagues “started making the tech, we were thinking of architects, engineers, contractors.” But, she adds, “disruptors like Andrew show us that when smart, curious, caring people are given new technological tools, they think of ways they can push the boundaries of their profession, which so often go beyond what we, the makers of that same tech, ever had in mind.”

During his time in Rome, Saunders focused mainly on the churches of Borromini, Bernini, Cortona, and Rinaldi. Then he headed north to Turin, where Guarini represented a “natural progression from Borromini, about 50 to 100 years later,” he explains. The progression “basically charts an evolution of the Baroque central plan in High Baroque from 1600 to 1700 in Rome, and then 1700 to 1750 in Turin.”

One doesn’t just wander into those venerable edifices and start scanning, though. Permission requires supplicating local and national layers of state and church bureaucracy. “That was one of the most challenging aspects,” he admits. “It started slowly, but then I started to make really good contacts and was able to access quite a few.” By the time he left Rome, he had been able to scan most of its important Baroque churches, apart from those in security-crazed Vatican City. One morning, at the Church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini in Rome, he made his way into a tiny underground crypt—the Falconiere Crypt—designed by Borromini.

“Not many people know about it,” he says. “You have to go into this two-foot passageway to get down there. So I went down into it, and I scanned it, and I came back out.”

Tried to, anyway. By then a “full-on mass” was under way.

“I just couldn’t come out with my scanner in the middle of mass,” he says. “There was no way to escape. So I spent the entire mass underground in this crypt. It was very small, and kind of creepy.”

Back in the old days of scanning —say, two or three years ago—“people had to use physical targets,” Saunders explains. “You would have to plant spheres around the site, or targets that you would pin up on walls. When you came back to register the scans, or composite them together so that they overlapped, you would have to find the spheres yourself and kind of stitch the pieces back together. But now the software and algorithms have gotten so advanced that they can find patterns and automatically register

and scan and put everything together.”

Even so, “in the case of someone like Bernini, where there’s so much figuration and columns within columns, you could scan for days and still miss parts,” he acknowledges. “So one of the things my research assistant [Ariel Cooke-

Zamora GAr’19] has been doing is patching and cleaning up all these areas.”

In Cooke-Zamora’s view, the Baroque Topologies project has transformed laser scanning “from a surveying tool to a

representational one,” with serious benefits for architecture students.

“I’m very lucky to have been one of the first people to see these churches in this way,” he says. “Orbiting around the point cloud grants the viewer perspectives that have never been seen—not even by the architect himself.”

Connors compares some of Saunders’ digital renderings to certain “astounding drawings” by Borromini, which “give us

the impression that we are seeing through structures as in an X-ray.” This same quality, he adds, “is evident when we see, in Saunders’ models, [Borromini’s] buildings as though they had turned to glass and we could look through them as we fly above them. They are images that grab us by the shoulders and shake us into new perceptions of Baroque architecture.”

When he taught a graduate seminar on Baroque architecture this past spring, Saunders and his high-tech renderings were able to address a longstanding problem for students of the genre. The architects left no blueprints behind, and had often improvised as they went along. As a result, he says, any plans they did draw up usually “have little to do with what actually gets built.” True, there are plenty of photographs to study, but those two-dimensional representations seldom capture the full three-dimensional realities.

“Oftentimes I found that an architectural drawing of, say, Bernini’s Sant’ Andrea al Quirinale did not match the existing form of the church,” says Cooke-Zamora. And until now, “a student doing a formal analysis of these works would have had to model the space using existing—often scarce or inaccurate—reference images.”

“We went from students finding four or five photographs and squinting at them, trying to figure out what the three-dimensionality is, to printing fragments by someone like Vittone—not having to visualize; just 3D-printing it, like they’re printing pieces of this church to analyze,” says Saunders. “It’s kind of mind-blowing.”

The scans make for a “night-and-day difference,” he adds. “Within two weeks, the students really know the difference between Cortona, Rinaldi, Borromini.”

“One thing I saw in some of the work of Andy’s seminar was the possibility to deconstruct the object differently, to understand differently the layers and strata of this kind of activation of space,” says Guido Zuliani. “The work raises the possibility of taking certain moldings or decorations and analyzing them separately from the rest of the building with incredible precision, which will elimi-

nate some of the ambiguities or guessing that is normally done.

“It is a little bit early to understand the range of possibilities,” he adds, “but the range is really big.”

For Saunders, teaching the only course in PennDesign’s Master of Architecture sequence that covers architectural history before 1850—and doing it with laser scans and 3D printouts—is a rewarding kind of time warp.

“I enjoy that,” he says simply. “It’s very Baroque.”

Category: 3D measurement , 3D modeling , Architecture , Corporate , Heritage , Metrology Tags: 3D digitalization dedicated to heritage, 3D documentation, 3D modelling, Architecture, baroque art, Baroque Topologies, corporate, Exhibition, faro, FARO FOCUS3D, FARO Laser Scanner, Heritage, Italy, Univeristy of Pennsylvania / Published: July 7, 2017

Jun

2017

3D Scanner Company of the Year

We are delighted to inform you that FARO has won the award for the 3D scanner company of the year !

“Given the standard of our fellow nominees competing for the prestigious 3D scanner company of the year award, we were delighted with our success,” enthused Dave Southam, Regional Manager Europe North at FARO Technologies. “As FARO scanners are particularly suited to the demands of the 3D printing industry our sales in this exciting global sector continue to grow at a phenomenal rate.

FARO Tracer M Laser Projector for Factory Metrology

FARO has recently launched the Tracer M Laser Projector. This new solution allows users to reduce the expensive delays associated with the alignment and assembly of large components, help improve process precision, and negate the need for physical templates and hard tooling.

The Tracer M uses Advanced Trajectory Control (ATC) to deliver fast projection. ATC provides superior dynamic accuracy and a rapid refresh rate which minimizes flicker. Photogrammetric targets are used to enable the best fit alignment of the projected image onto the surface or object, thereby allowing the projected image to be consistent with the CAD model.

For larger assemblies and for use in space-constrained areas, multiple Tracer M projectors can be controlled from a single workstation to provide large-scale virtual templates in one coordinate system. The risk of human error and costly scrap during assembly is significantly reduced, in addition, manufacturers are able to avoid the time and expense associated with using large, heavy templates.

Drone Hero Europe 2017

Think 3D has recently entered the STORMBEE into the Public Drone Hero Europe 2017 award.

The Belgian company has combined the FARO Focus 3D X 130 with a drone to create the world’s first high precision 3D scanning drone. A common problem faced by many users of our laser scanner was that it was a very time consuming process for them to create 3D models of sites from a stationary position. In order to increase productivity and make the process of scanning sites more efficient, Think 3D came up with the concept of combining the FARO Focus 3D X 130 laser scanner with a drone. After a research period of 4 years, STORMBEE was created which now allows Think 3D to deliver requested 3D models to clients within a 24 hour time frame, much faster than a company that does fixed scans.

Drone Hero Europe is a contest for everyone to participate in which allows teams to show their innovations in the field of drones to a large public audience. It also gives the innovators a chance to connect with potential customers or partners.

The winner of this competition will receive an all access pass as well as an exhibit space in Las Vegas at the Commercial UAV Expo Americas. The competition is open until 12.00 on 22nd June 2017.

In order to see the STORMBEE video and vote, please Click Here.

Category: Corporate Tags: 3D, Belgium, drone, drone hero europe, FARO FOCUS3D, FARO Laser Scanner, STORMBEE, think 3d, uav expo americas / Published: May 30, 2017

May

2017

FARO’s Speed and Accuracy aids Rail Project

The use of a FARO Focus3D X 330 Laser Scanner helps to ensure the delivery of precise precast concrete structural elements to the Ordsall Chord project, part of Network Rail’s £1bn+ railway upgrade plan for the North of England.

A joint venture between Skanska BAM Nuttall is currently involved in delivering the Ordsall Chord, part of the Great North Rail Project to improve railway services. The project will help to increase connectivity across towns and cities and enable the Government’s so-called Northern Powerhouse initiative to boost economic growth in the North of England.

Since October 2015, work has been taking place on the Ordsall Chord. This new section of track will create a link between Manchester city centre’s main train stations; Victoria, Oxford Road and Manchester Piccadilly, for the first time. However, for this vital piece of track to be fitted, a huge amount of preparatory work needs to take place. This includes realigning existing track-, building new bridges, removing disused arches and restoring Grade I listed structures related to what is a section of the world’s first passenger railway.

The delivery of incorrectly sized precast concrete elements had the potential to cause long delays to the Ordsall Chord project and to disrupt road and rail travel. To help eliminate this possibility a fool-proof system of laser scanning the critical structural elements has been adopted.

Dan Binney, Skanska BAM, Senior Engineering Surveyor explained. “Work on the Ordsall Chord involves reconfiguring the existing railway between Eccles and Deansgate, Eccles and Manchester Victoria and Deansgate and Salford Crescent stations. Other work includes the installation of two new bridges, the renovation of an existing bridge, the widening of a viaduct and establishing a new track lay out.

“The track changes will allow the 300 metre chord, a brand new section of railway, to connect with the new layout. As part of the project, a range of large, precast concrete, structural elements are manufactured off-site. Although we are able to make on-site adjustments to accommodate very minor size discrepancies, the delivery of precast structures that fall outside our specified dimensional tolerances would render them useless and cause massive time delays.

Category: 3D Documentation , Architecture , BIM Tags: Manchester, Ordsall Chord, Skanksa BAM / Published: May 12, 2017

May

2017

FARO – AMS Webinar

FARO are working together with AMS on an automotive Webinar to inform viewers about our 3D measuring and scanning solutions.

Webinar title: FARO 3D Portable Measurement and Inspection Solutions for the Pre-Production Phase in Automotive Manufacturing

Webinar content description:
The application of portable 3D metrology solutions has superseded traditional measurement and inspection methods as OEMs continue to recognise the benefits of this technology in manufacturing processes. In this webinar we will focus on the principle metrology challenges in the decisive pre-production phase. The presentation will describe how FARO’s portable 3D metrology technology can be applied in pre-production phases such as first articles, tools and jigs, dies and moulds and BIW, increasing productivity and reducing cycle time.

Date: Tuesday 16 May 2017
Time: BST 15:00 (CEST 16.00 | EDT 10:00 | SGT 22.00)

Presenter: Majid Yaqub – Sales Engineer at FARO Technologies UK

To register please Click Here.

Category: Corporate Published: May 3, 2017

Apr

2017

Inno-Tech Days Oxford 2017

The next FARO Inno-Tech Days event will be held on the 18th May 2017 at the Science and Technologies Facilities Council in Oxford.

On display will be a wide range of our latest innovations including:

– the longest range and most accurate laser projector ever – the FARO Tracer M
– the truly mobile FARO Focus^SLaser Scanner for fast, secure and reliable scanning
– the recently launched mobile remote controlled Vantage S and Vantage E Laser Trackers with hot swappable batteries
– our latest robot-compatible automation solution – the FARO Cobalt Array Imager

AGENDA:

09.00 – 10.00	Welcome and Introduction
10.00 – 11.00	Presentation of FARO
11.00 – 12.00	Free demo sessions
12.00 – 13.00	Latest FARO innovations
13.00 – 13.30	Lunch
13.30 – 14.30	Free demo sessions
14.30 – 15.15	Presentation of more FARO innovations
15.15 – 16.00	Free demo sessions

To register please Click Here.

Category: BIM , Corporate Tags: BIM, faro, FARO Cobalt 3D Imager, Faro Laser Tracker Vantage, Focus, Inno-Tech Days, oxford, science and technologies facilities council / Published: April 27, 2017

Apr

2017

Eurosia and FARO: the perfect mix of BIM services and 3D Laser Scanning

Eurosia S.A. is a European group delivering BIM solutions to the AEC and EPC sectors in the Benelux, France, the UAE and the UK. The main goal of Eurosia as a company is to provide surveyors, general and MEP contractors with accurate BIM models to use in construction or renovation projects. The need for BIM modeling is constantly increasing with regard to construction or renovation projects.

Cedric Brusselmans, co-founder of Eurosia explains the problem they wish to solve: “The main challenge that we observe in various countries such as the Benelux and France – is that they consist mainly of medium to small companies of surveyors. This means that if they have to create a 3D model based on a point cloud, they may lose time, thus decreasing their productivity and revenue. In fact, while spending time on creating the 3D model, the surveyor may not be able to accept new projects. Our team try to take that burden away from them. Surveyors deliver us the point cloud and we create a full 3D model for them according to their specifications.”

In the process of Eurosia, surveyors can either upload their point cloud to the Eurosia server or Eurosia organizes a courier service to pick up the surveyor’s USB stick or mini-hard drive containing the point cloud within 24 hours (for point clouds that are too big in size – above 10 GB – and cannot be sent via usual channels). They then indicate which types of deliverables they would like to acquire. There will be a conversation between the surveyors and Eurosia’s project manager to ensure that standards, specifications and scope of work are matching with the requirement. As Eurosia is taking care of the BIM model creation, surveyors can focus on their core business. Eurosia also offers 3D animation (virtual reality) services: such animation shows the building in its future state and actual environment.

Mr. Brusselmans explains: “We started this journey with FARO when we were exhibiting next to them at a trade fair in France. Naturally you start talking to your trade fair neighbors. Our respective teams saw the added value of each other’s solution. Following this event, we requested a meeting with FARO to show their different products. It was at that time we both saw that there was a connection between our services and that the combination could provide a great solution for surveyor companies. As a whole, a laser scanner is the opening door to many. This combination can also improve project efficiency for construction and installation companies.”

Eurosia sees itself working in collaboration with companies such as FARO to ensure that they can provide a good service level and adequate support to their clients. Once a BIM model and the BIM process is in place for a project, the collaboration among the different stakeholders can be smoother and more efficient. They all have the same data from the BIM model (drawings and measurements), which decreases the number of mistakes in construction and ultimately avoids extra costs and waste of time for all stakeholders.

Category: BIM , Corporate Tags: 3D, Eurosia, point cloud, Surveying, VR / Published: April 19, 2017

Apr

2017

Think 3D first to commercialize 3D drone scanning

The use of 3D scanning for industrial environments has already been done since the 3D laser scanner has been invented. However, scanning with a fixed solution often provided problems, technicians often had to do dangerous climbs to be able to scan everything, machines had to stop working, etc. Belgian company Think 3D has found the solution by combining the FARO Focus3D X130 with a drone to create the world’s first high precision 3D scanning drone.

Think 3D is a Belgian company that provides 3D CAD models for complex industrial installations ranging from different sectors such as petrochemistry, steel, pharmaceuticals and the food industry. Think 3D is called in when the companies want to make changes to their installations and need a full 3D CAD model of their installation. The customer can then use this model as they please, to give to the architect, add to specifications or to create a 3D tour of the facility with.

To read more Click Here.

Category: Corporate Published: April 13, 2017

FARO Releases ZONE 3D for Public Safety Professionals

Sacred Scanning Interiors

3D Scanner Company of the Year

FARO Tracer M Laser Projector for Factory Metrology

Drone Hero Europe 2017

FARO’s Speed and Accuracy aids Rail Project

FARO – AMS Webinar

Inno-Tech Days Oxford 2017

Eurosia and FARO: the perfect mix of BIM services and 3D Laser Scanning

Think 3D first to commercialize 3D drone scanning

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