How to survey a building

[Field Engineer]

I am wondering if any of you use an app to survey existing buildings. I seen a few, but most of them are for construction management. I am looking for something simple and efficient.

 

[dik]

What type of survey? For distress? for dimensions? something else? If for distress, I have a *.dot template for description, that I include photos... insert the *.jpg files in photo templates with a description and then print to a *.pdf to greatly reduce size.

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So strange to see the singularity approaching while the entire planet is rapidly turning into a hellscape. -John Coates

-Dik

 

[phamENG]

Best mass market thing out there that I'm aware of is Bluebeam. I've just started playing with the capture feature in markups. I have a Surface Pro, so I can go to a site and either have existing drawings pulled up or sketch a floor plan on a blank PDF in Bluebeam. Then I can use the cloud tool or the call out tool to identify something on the plan. Right click on the markup, go to Capture, then select from Camera. I can take a picture and it embeds the photo in the markup for later reference. I'd like to play with toolsets and see if I can create a little camera icon that has the ability to embed the image, but I haven't messed with that yet.

You do have to be careful - if you flatten the pdf, the images are gone. So this is more of reference tool for you rather than a finished product.

The only other 'inspection app' I've used was custom built by the firm I was working for to inspect sewer systems. We had a multi-million dollar 3 year contract to complete a large scale sewer mapping and condition assessment job, so it made sense. Might be an interesting idea to create one for general structural assessments.

 

[Ingenuity]

A large national forensics firm, with considerable fame (whom I do not work for), has a cool app called 'PlanNotate' that is for field survey/forensic work. Uses the cloud and an iPad.

I believe the app is freely available for download but I think you need to be a registered user to effectively use it.

From what I have seen it would be a great commercial app for many engineers for field notes/surveys etc. I guess it is vapor-ware until (or if) it becomes commercial.

 

[dold]

Our firm has a Matterport Pro2 LiDAR scanner. It's awesome for gathering tons of data / dimensions / pictures, and the result is a 3D model of the survey. You can pull dimensions from the model, but they're only so accurate - about 1" resolution. So you're not going to be able to gather fine dimensional data like precise measurements of steel joists for example. But it's great for overall building dimensions and it's quite fast. I think they're around $3000, and you have to buy an iPad to run the app and control the scanner which is probably another $1k or so? Worth every penny in my opinion. And I'm not sure about the other services you'd need to subscribe to in order to process the data on their servers...

 

[phamENG]

These feels very ChatGPT-ish...

 

[Field Engineer]

I agree the post by “Ryan” is very much what chat GPT would say.