CHARLOTTE SQUARE
LASER SURVEY
eBIM were asked to carry out a full measured building survey of Charlotte Square properties 25-31. One of the most imposing buildings in Edinburgh, the site is made up of a basement area connecting 6 properties, with 4 storeys above and a tunnel linking it to the adjacent Mews Building, all of which were to be surveyed.
The property was designed by Robert Adam in 1791 one of Scotlands greatest neo classical architects and was originally the home of John Crichton-Stuart, 4th Marquess of Bute. More recently the building was home to the National Trust Headquarters in Scotland.
DATA CAPTURE
The site posed a number of potential difficulties for the scanning team due to its size and complexity. Luckily the basement area connected all the buildings which allowed a good control network to be established joining all the properties together.
Scanning in this type of environment with lots of tight corridors and passageways causes a number of issues. It is essential that plenty of targets are used to ensure a good registration as it can be very hard to go back and add missing detail into the scan at a later date.
Stairs are particularly tricky and in one instance there was even a very tight spiral staircase.
MODELLING
Scanning was carried out over 2 weeks and in total over 500 scans were recorded! The site was broken down into separate clusters for the basement and then for each floor to improve registration.
Breaking the site up into clusters for each floor also makes it easier to export the webshare for each level.
Point CAB creates very clear scaled images as 40m tiles. These can easily be imported into Revit and used as the basis for the model.
In total it took 3 weeks to convert the pointcloud to the final Revit model.