Sydney based Project Surveyors have taken out the Leica Buildings/Heritage award at the recent HxGN Live conference in Las Vegas for their comprehensive laser scanning and modelling of Sydney’s Castle Towers shopping centre.
A panel of 11 qualified judges evaluated 24 entries based on the completeness and usefulness of the plans, the creative use of point clouds and models, and overall appearance. Project Surveyors prepared a survey accurate architectural and structural Revit model of the existing centre, encompassing approximately 375,000 square meters. Using the latest Leica C10 and P20 laser scanners, it took 3,700 scans and 55 site days to fully scan the building, and a further 120 office days to complete the model.
Nathan Milligan of Project Surveyors thanked the six or so staff directly involved with the project. He noted the efforts of Scott Deveridge and the two or three field crews that worked through the night on the scanning. Milligan also pointed out the efforts of Andy Jackson, who was responsible for overseeing the modelling. Jackson was brought from England to join the Project Surveyors team for his experience in Building Information Modelling (BIM) projects in the UK.
While not strictly a BIM project, the scale and comprehensiveness of the project has all the same elements and has seen the firm garner international attention from Leica and Autodesk. “It’s getting us a bit of a reputation as market leaders in this type of work,” said Milligan.
John Reddington, national manager of laser scanning at C.R.Kennedy describes it as an “internationally significant project,” noting that apart from a handful of projects completed in the UK, there has been no accurate 3D modelling projects as comprehensive.
“They transformed their business through laser scanning and through their own hard work in getting expertise in the software side of things.”
Milligan pointed out that it was the first time Project Surveyors have ever done anything of this scale before. “We do a lot of as-built work for commercial buildings and a couple of little shopping centres, but this was our first job of this size for sure.”
Milligan attributed much of the success of the project to Leica’s recently updated Cyclone software for point cloud data: “It allowed us to register and process the point cloud data a lot quicker than we previously would have done it, so that was a significant development and something that I think made a massive improvement.”
A feature article on the project will appear in the upcoming August/September issue of Position magazine.
