Creating 3D Models From 2D Floor Plans: Part 1

Recently, I was my opinion on the best way for a customer to build a 3D model of their facility.  They were considering getting the building scanned to aid in the process.  As much as I like working with scan data, I personally see some sort comings from modeling from scans.  When it was mentioned that the customer had a 2D AutoCAD floor plann of the facility, I was hit with a little inspiration.

Using a 2D floor plan as the basis of a 3D building model in AutoCAD Architecture or Revit is really easy.  Those softwares allow you to create walls, doors, windows, etc, while snapping to geometry from the 2D floor plan.

One of the problems with working from 2D floor plans of a building is that they are rarely up-to-date.  At my last job, we had a floor plan of the entire building, but no one ever maintained it.  That is unless a project arose that needed it.  Then it was a scramble to update the drawing by going and taking a ton of measurements.

This is where the 3D scan can come into play.  The 3D scan can be used to validate the model from the 2D floor plan.  Sure Revit and AutoCAD Architecture both have tools for inserting a ReCap point cloud, but ReCap has a function, currently in Beta, where you can attach a Navisworks model.  Once the Navisworks model is attached, it will overlay the Navisworks model when you are viewing the actual scan in RealView.  There is just one catch to this, the origins of the ReCap model and the Navisworks model need to align.  If not, you find it a lot harder to detect the differences between the two models.

The initial ReCap workflow is the same as pretty much every other ReCap project.

1. Create a Project
2. Import the Scans
3. Process the Scans, manually registering any scans that did not get merged into the project
4. Create regions as needed
5. Update the origin if needed

Here is a video that shows these steps for my sample project.

The next step will be to import the AutoCAD floor plan into Revit and create the walls and other architecture element.  These steps will come in my next blog post and video.