3D Laser Scanning
- Service line
- Reality Capture & BIM
- Coverage
- Dubai and across the United Arab Emirates
- Primary output
- Registered point cloud
- Produced from it
- 2D drawings, 3D CAD, BIM
A laser scan measures the building that is actually there, not the one in the design set. Petra Point captures built condition by 3D laser scanning, registers the survey to control, and hands it over in a working format. The capture is the same either way. What changes is what gets extracted from it.
What we scan
Buildings and the spaces inside them. Whole floors, single units, facades, cores, plant rooms, atriums and the awkward parts of a building that a tape measure and a design drawing never resolve properly.
Scanning suits the situations where the answer has to come from the building rather than from a drawing: where the built condition has drifted from the design set, where the drawings are missing or out of date, or where a decision depends on a dimension nobody can currently confirm.
How the work runs
The sequence is short and it does not vary much. The discipline is in doing each step properly, not in doing it differently.
- Survey control is established so every scan position shares one coordinate frame
- The building is scanned from as many positions as the geometry needs
- The scans are registered into a single coordinated dataset
- Drawings, models or data are extracted from the registered survey
What you receive
A scan is not a deliverable on its own. What you receive is decided before we start, because it changes how densely and from how many positions the building is captured.
- Registered point cloud, in the exchange format the project requires
- As-built survey report
- 2D plans, elevations and sections
- 3D CAD model
- BIM model at an agreed level of detail
When scanning is the right tool
Scanning earns its cost when the deliverable needs surface rather than points: a refurbishment or fit-out working into an existing shell, a building with missing or superseded drawings, a handover record, or a case where what was built has to be checked against what was permitted.
It is not always the right instrument. Where the deliverable is a boundary or a small set of dimensions, a conventional instrument survey gets there faster and costs less. The method follows the deliverable, and we will say so if scanning is not what your job needs.
Working in occupied buildings
Most of the buildings worth scanning are in use. Hotels, malls, offices and residential towers cannot be emptied for a survey, and a scan that disrupts trading is not a good scan.
Capture is planned around access: floor by floor, zone by zone, or outside operating hours where that is what it takes. Tell us how the building runs and the programme is built around it rather than against it.