Gustav Skans is a civil engineer with more than 30 years of experience within hydropower development and structural engineering, who is currently employed by Sweco. Sweco is Europe’s leading engineering and architecture consultancy, with yearly net sales of approximately 2 billion EUR.
“It doesn’t cost much to do laser scanning, and you will get much better quality. It is advisable to try and avoid using surveyors only to measure terrain and existing structures with the use of a total station. It is instead preferable to prepare 3D scan data as this enables one to collect and process all the information that is needed for an existing building, or terrain for a green field project, and it can often be delivered within the same day or two. Scanning will provide data on basically everything that is visible, and you can later filter out what you don’t need in your design” – Gustav Skans, Civil Engineer at Sweco.
The Need
Exterior of the hydroelectric powerplant in Sweden, in use since 1918
Sweco have been using 3D scanners for a long time, including the use of airborne lidar. For Gustav Skans, who often works on redevelopment projects for existing hydroelectric power plants, 3D measurement data often proves to be extremely convenient.
This is because many of the existing hydropower plants and dams he works on are nearing the end of their expected lifespan, and sufficient as-built documentation is often lacking. This is the case with one of his current projects in a hydroelectric powerplant in Sweden that is more than 100 years old and is in need of some renewal measures. The entire machine hall and most of the waterways needed to be scanned in order for the redesign and upgrading of the power station to take place.
Before using Undet for SketchUp, although he was able to request point cloud data to be collected, he did not have a way to turn this into initial design plans in SketchUp. With no solution in place, it meant that processing data was extremely time-consuming. The effect of this being that answering client queries could take a week or more, and projects progressed slowly. Therefore, he was looking for a solution to use point clouds in SketchUp that would speed up his work and provide more accurate results to clients.
Undet for SketchUp is a plugin that enables users of SketchUp to create 3D models based on point cloud data. That includes features such as ground meshing tools to extract ground surface levels from point cloud data, an auto extraction feature to maximise accuracy when extracting/extruding/fitting the SketchUp plane to point cloud points and a point cloud clipping box to control the information available in the model view. Undet for Sketchup is also 2-3x faster than its rivals at processing point cloud data.
