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Job Opening: Terrestrial 3D Scanning

15

LandAir Surveying uses a terrestrial 3D scanner to scan high density pointclouds (2 billion points). Some of their clients require a video presentation of these datasets. After the pointcloud has been downsampled, they use Blender for the visualisation. They're looking for a Blender artist.

James wrote:

LandAir Surveying has an immediate opening for anyone that may be interested in helping us expanded our current 3D Scanning department. We have owned a 3D terrestrial scanner for 3 years and now the technology is finally taking off in the USA.

Job Position: 3D Modeler

Task: Using Leica Cyclone (ON JOB TRAINING PROVIDED) create solid and mesh models for delivery to our clients. Many of our clients would like presentation movies to be created from the point cloud. You can see some of our basic deliverable videos. So some of the projects would include creating the final environments and renders using Blender.

Requirements

  • A good working knowledge of Blender.
  • Willingness to learn.
  • Self motivated.
  • Able to work under deadlines.

Helpful Knowledge (however we will train you):

  • AutoCad
  • Leica Cyclone
  • Meshlab

The one downfall of the job position is that you will have to report to our office in Georgia. Currently the Leica Cyclone software that we use cost $15,000 per seat and it is node locked.

That said, if you have point cloud software of your own that can handle upwards of 2 BILLION points and can be used to create models we may be able to setup an FTP so that we can transfer files back and forth across the net.

The videos we have shown on youtube are of our smaller projects. Most of the larger ones we can not show due to none disclosure agreements with our clients.

Please send your resumes to landairsurveyinginfo at gmail dot com.

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

15 Comments

  1. It's seems a lot of retouching work need to do...but I'll give it a try if the company accepts oversea workers.

    I think the "smaller projects" they mean is they are misc projects which are not too sensitive to disclose, comparing to most architectural projects.

  2. I slapped together some software that visualizes the raw (Aerial LiDAR) point clouds, it uses OpenSceneGraph. We visualize parts of the AHN2 dataset, which is being acquired for the whole of the Netherlands over a period of 5 years. In order to use these datasets (several TB) in Blender, one should build a database pager.

    See a (year old) video on vimeo:
    http://vimeo.com/3198257

  3. @Gerwin: Very nice result :)

    @Sebastian: Impressive! I don't understand how that one laser, rotating once around the room on the z axes could generate that much data - don't you have to have the laser rotate in all directions, a 360x360 rotation so you do not miss any geometry?

  4. It would be really nice if Blender had the appropriate data structures for working with these types of point clouds. I have played around a little bit with some of our terrestrial lidar point data in Blender, however, with anything but the smallest data sets (a few thousand points) it is completely impractical. Fortunately, using decimated meshes generated from the data in other programs is much more reasonable. Also as someone else already mentioned, depending on the desired final project a huge amount of manual editing may be required.

  5. **banor - realy, only one turn around 'z' axis, so I miss the floor and ceiling. There are 480 vertices from one video frame, so:
    480 verts/frame * 82sec * 30 frames/sec = 1 180 800 vertex.

    You see that I used only about 6.1% of posible points (gif format with about 10frames/s, verticaly only 96 verts/frame).

    **Jed - I am working on python script that generate mesh from point clouds, but that is really difficult (algorithms). I also found open MeshLab (http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/).

  6. **Korczak - Surface reconstruction is hard. There are some algorithms in VTK but yeah MeshLab is one of the only open source end user packages I am aware of specifically designed for working with this type of data. Even MeshLab doesn't cope terribly well with large volumes of data.

    Solving all of these problems in Blender is probably not desirable. What I have been dreaming about is something like Alice Labs' Studio Clouds plugins for Maya and 3DS Max. They allow you to load large point clouds (billions of points) and render them or use them for reference while modeling. A process that in many cases may be much more efficient than trying to clean up a meshed point cloud.

  7. Frank_robernson on

    This isn't very good at all?You get these files of points & I am guessing we have to light them and texture them ...that's a waste of time I think & this method destroys the whole animation industry it won't make it better.

    We need more information before we continue on this, you would need a lot of people to edit this project to finish it.

  8. hi,
    i m having leica cyclone software.i can model objects from laser point cloud data.if you are intrested please mail me.

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