Create True As-Built Models from Points Collected in the Field

How do you currently create as-built models? How do you convert potentially inaccurate 2D drawings to accurate 3D models? Often this is a slow, expensive or imperfect process that is contracted to a specialist firm.

Autodesk Point Layout has convenient features to help create as-built files from survey data collected in the field. Combined with reduced hardware costs and a lower barrier to entry of skills needed to collect as-built points, applications like BIM 360 Layout quickly and easily allow you to create more predictable models.

Here are two videos demonstrating two different workflows.  First, you can easily create pipes, walls or model lines in Revit using a numbered sequence of points collected out on site.

The second workflow, highlighted in the video below, shows any item where you have a single point (typically a column, or a pipe fitting, or something that may not need to be oriented) can be placed wherever the as-built point is collected. Firstly, add a point to the family in Revit.  Next, load that family into the project you are working with.  Lastly, import the points as a nested family, and like magic, an as-built model of, in this case Marvin the Paranoid Android from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (thanks to BIMstore) appears.

It's also possible to perform these functions in AutoCAD which allows you to get model lines through to base further modelling from.

Let us know what you think of this feature and how you would use it. Or how you would like to see it develop!