I run a 3D laser survey company which produces as built 3D models and Topographical surveys in Revit. I have just changed my entire workflow from AutoCAD to Revit so still have some level of familiarity with AutoCAD.
I was looking for ground cleaning software that could handle some of the large topographical files I collect. With a number of the products that I fond during my research it was hard to find a blend that wasn’t complicated, prone to blue screening due to memory limitations or with limits of the size of point clouds. Undet for AutoCAD seemed to have what I wanted, didn’t seem to require me to recalibrate my brain to learn something brand new, didn’t appear brutally expensive and had some pretty good guides on their YouTube channel. I used to manually remove unwanted vegetation from point clouds but for properties with overgrown gardens it was becoming disproportionately time consuming, was difficult and wasn’t cost effective for my time spent so decided to make the leap to paying for something that would help. Undet don’t do the ground cleaning software for Revit at the time of writing this review but allegedly it will soon be available. Once I have the mesh from Undet (which I use in AutoCAD Civil 3D) I then import into Revit and create a Revit Topo.
Undet for AutoCAD review from my perspective
– I needed something that removed everything except the bare ground surface incl trees, cars, plants, long grass, properties etc. I must confess Undet for AutoCAD does that very well. It does benefit from some help by me cutting out the really obvious vertical surfaces of properties before I ask it to clean and then create a mesh surface. This is due to some natural creep up in elevation as the algorithm clearly tries to average out the height changes. Marius from the Undet team got back to me immediately with some tweaks to help improve this very quickly and they work well. I really appreciated someone telling me the answer without having to trawl forums.
– The Undet Team were very good by giving me a week of trial run. I ran out of time due to a client with a time constraint and didn’t complete all the testing I needed and asked for another week which they gave me straight away. On top of the product actually working it was probably this level of them being prepared to be flexible and helpful that clinched the deal for me.
– They had a month by month option for Undet for AutoCAD costing $120 which was at the upper limit of what I was prepared to pay ( I would have rated it 5 stars and raved about it if it was $100) but it is very convenient to decide if I need it each month as doing good detailed topos with contours from sites with heavy vegetation appears to be a unique selling point at the moment. When it becomes less fashionable I can save my cash for when a job comes up.
– The software carried through all the DGPS geolocation I applied that I was worried about losing during the process, so big tick from me.
– There is a deformation analysis tool which you can tune by colour and level to give a heatmap of elevations. Very cool, quick and useful for structural engineers or ground work guys who want to check on the integrity of a surface (horizontal, vertical or otherwise)
– Keen to test how to join meshes together to make 3D meshes but if it works as well as the rest of the product then it should be fine.
Thumbs up from me, looking forward to see if they manage to translate the same product into Revit.
Piers