The worldwide architectural design firm HKS has been doing some impressive large-scale scan to BIM projects. The subject of a presentation at the SPAR Conference was 50 United Nations Plaza in San Francisco, a 360,000 s.f. federal building that was scanned and modeled in three weeks for retrofit preparation for a large federal client.
This detailed scan of a building on the historic register required some interesting feature manipulations in order to capture a suitable level of detail in a building with many detailed historical architectural elements. The size and detail of the building didn’t allow for full scan and representation of each element give file size limitations, so the model made use of some “jedi mind tricks” of visualization in order to aptly represent the building for the desired purpose of the model.
In all of the Scan to BIM sessions at the event, there’s a great degree of discussion about format and software manipulations. In a similar GSA project in Chicago, the team used no fewer than 14 different software packages and discussed a format workflow that includes COBIE, gbXML, IFC, DGN, DWG, etc.
HKS assigns one person as a controller of this complex process to facilitate and manage the manipulations of files and formats to develop a central integrated file. This person aptly holds the title of Data Wrangler.
Given the complexity of the tasks and the limitations of the software to capture and quickly render the level of details in such large models, it’s only a matter of time before more interoperability and performance are brought to bear on the problem. Until these issues are ironed out, any firm conducting such work should be prepared for data wrangling pains.
