13 Sep State of the art 3D Laser Scanning used to survey Skytrain Main Street-Science World Station
How things have changed! In the past, surveying an elevated guideway like the Skytrain in Vancouver was a difficult and time consuming task. Not anymore. This summer, the guideway and station at Main Street were surveyed by Underhill in a couple of days using a 3D Laser Scanner. The FARO Focus 3D scanner can collect nearly 1 million points per second, to an accuracy of a few millimetres. The data produced is referred to as a “point cloud”. The full 3D “cloud” of the station was more than 20 billion points! Underhill worked with Digital Surveys to create the 3D Revit model of the station. It was utilized by the project team (Graham Construction & Engineering Inc., and Industrial Steel & Manufacturing Inc.) to design, and construct upgrades to the Station.
The video fly-through of the project below was created from the point cloud using Pointools, Autodesk 3DS Max, and Windows Live Movie Maker. It starts with a coloured rendering of the point cloud that morphs into the Revit model with animation and then morphs back to the point cloud – all while flying through the model. The Underhill Geomatics YouTube Channel contains many other videos. Underhill’s FARO Scene WebShare site contains a number of “shares” of the project, along with many others.
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The Main Street-Science World station is the oldest of the SkyTrain stations. Originally built with one kilometre of track as a demonstration line in 1982, it was reopened in 1986 for the official launch of the Expo Line during Expo ’86. Now, it is one of the busiest stations.(Translink)