How long does scan to BIM take?

Where the time goes

• Scanning on site. Hours for a house or a plant room, a day or more for a large building. It depends on how many rooms and how much is in the way.
• Registering the scans. Joining the setups into one point cloud. Usually a few hours in the registration software.
• Modelling. Drawing every wall, floor, opening and pipe over the points. This is the long part: days for one floor of an office, weeks for a building with dense services.
• Checking and fixing. Comparing the model with the scan and correcting what is off. Often a day or two more, and it repeats when the client sends comments.

What makes it take longer

• Services. Ducts, pipes and cable trays take far longer than walls and floors.
• Old or irregular buildings. Walls that lean, floors that slope and rooms that are not square.
• Clutter. Furniture, stock and equipment hide the surfaces the model has to follow.
• Gaps in the scan. Areas the scanner never saw have to be guessed or rescanned.

Shortening it

Scanning and registration are hard to speed up. The modelling is where the days go, and it is the step Tesseract by Landex takes off your hands.