Artec 3D Debuts its Artec Ray Laser Scanner for BIM

Artec 3D presented at SPAR 3D their latest product the Artec Ray, professional metrology-grade laser scanner.

Artec Ray with Smart Car

A self-described world-leader in 3D hardware and software technology, Artec 3D is known for its handheld scanners. Some of the key features of the Artec Ray include:

• Can capture objects up to 110 meters away, producing high quality data with submillimeter accuracy
• 4-hour internal battery for untethered operation
• Well-suited for reverse engineering large objects, quality control and inspection tasks, product design, building information modeling (BIM) in the construction industry, capturing full crime scenes in the field of forensics and the historical digital preservation of monuments and heritage sites
• Easily digitize large objects ranging from buildings to wind turbines to airplanes, without the use of markers on the object

Artec 3D has been in the 3D scanning market for 11 years, primarily in the mechanical engineering market.

Artec Ray

According to Chief Business Development Officer, Andrei Vakulenko, a significant part of their business is architectural design and restoration of any small elements of the decorations of the buildings, etc.

“We focus on professional scanners, they typically are extremely precise, and we are helping people use scanners to save time,”  said Vakulenko. “Then this year, we decided to expand our line of the product and introduce Artec Ray, a long range scanners that is very precise and provides the mood quality of scanning with up to sub millimeter accuracy.”

Artec Ray is very reliable for BIM management, Vakulenko said, and sometimes its accuracy is greater than people really need. “Sometimes when you use a scanner for building management you need just a general picture of what is happening and need to document just walls, rooms, etc., but sometimes you need to document architectural details or mechanical parts. In these situations Artec Ray will be a good product. It’s not more than 15% more expensive than products offered by our competitors, and they don’t have the accuracy we do. Which is good enough for BIM sometimes but not good enough for scanning details.”

Industrial devices need greater accuracy. You don’t need to control the positioning of this scanner. If you need to mount the scanner 70% to the horizontal, it will work properly, and still produce the correct scan in this position. This feature was named QVision.

In September, Artec 3D plans to introduce their special software for mobile phones which will make managing the scanner more convenient.

While using the mobile phone as a type of remote control for the scanner, the scanner will be using its own battery.

The scanner software allows you to combine the scanner scans with the scans from the handheld scanner, so when you use the geometrical shadow feature, the idea is if you have some object between walls or maybe a big round object, and you have something between the scanner and the big round object, the scanner will not see anything in the shadow of this object before. If the construction has a skin that’s a difficult shape, sometimes you need to change to many positions to receive the whole picture without holes. The combination of the long range laser scanner and handheld allow you to make this process significantly quicker, you can receive the generic picture from 2-4 points, identify this geometrical shadow, and do a very quick scan of this place with the handheld.

“We have our own software, Artec Studio, a special software for scanning and post processing that is well integrated with software used for engineering and construction so you can export a file in any format, i.e., Bentley, AutoCAD or Power Shape or SolidWorks,” said Vakulenko.

The maximum distance for the scanner is 110 meters. Sometimes 300 meters is needed, but the Artec Ray is good for medium scans such as architectural, mechanical and wind turbines.

Scans are made of outside and inside an object or building, then the scans are aligned to see the correct picture of the object.

Vakulenko said the typical lifespan of one of their 3D scanners is ten years. “We know approximately 93% of our scanners are still in use, and we understand it’s an investment of many years. Maybe you will need more precise images in the future, and it’s good to have the additional accuracy as you must have precise data.”

Categories: 2D, 3D, AEC, AECCafe, architecture, AutoCAD, Autodesk, Bentley Systems, BIM, building information modeling, Cloud, construction, engineering, field, field solutions, mobile, reality capture, simulation, site planning, video, virtual reality

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