Digital Surveys were commissioned by Howarth Litchfield to carry out an as built full measured building survey of Arnold School in Blackpool. The site is home to a large rambling private school, which has evolved over the years to form a rabbit warren of classrooms, halls and corridors. As Howarth Litchfield are looking to move towards BIM workflows for more of their projects, they opted to use Digital Surveys scan to Revit service.

By utilising 3D laser scanning Digital could carry out all the site work very quickly, effectively documenting the whole site in less than a week. This allowed the survey work to be carried out in half term minimising any disruption to the students.

Scanning and managing projects of this size requires care full organisation and splitting the site up into clusters and sub clusters that can be managed as chunks. With over 300 scans and 45GB of raw data processing and storing these sized projects requires the latest computer hardware and network infrastructure. Digital run 64bit workstations, with dual CAT6 gigabit connections to our LAN providing smooth transfer of files.

Once registered the data could be converted to crisp scaled ortho images and dropped into Revit to begin the modelling process. By using software like PointCAB & Pointools Digital could very quickly generate all the elevations.

With this project the main hurdle was the large number of level changes within the internal of the building. This made the modelling process very complicated, however by referencing the 3D point Cloud and using our WEBSHARE virtual collaboration tool the entire site could be delivered in Revit 2011.