RTC360 Not so great really

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Re: RTC360 Not so great really

Post by Matt Young »

Nice post Steve. :like: Bit long mate :lol:

Hopefully the future for me will be one where I don't get involved with scanners or data anymore. It does pay the bills :) Since the very first day scanning with a 2500 on a London street in 2001... I must have scanned and processed something like 50Tb+ of data. 2Tb in the last week... I have been all over the world. Sometimes to places most people would not dare to go.

I would much rather tend to my garden, create a sculpture, a painting or tinker with my pre-war cars. I'm just tired of scanning stuff and watching progress bars.

It's has for the most part been fun.
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Re: RTC360 Not so great really

Post by tomii7 »

Wow, I see that I miss LSforum for weeks. That's a great topic where we have a good sense of humor and the opinions of users.
I need to read often:).

If I can add my two cents, yes RTC360 change a lot in terms of speed of 3D scanning but the latest firmware is really good.
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Re: RTC360 Not so great really

Post by gary_lawes »

A Great thread, thought I would throw in my experience.

I should start with context, we are not surveying professionals, simply a small Architectural practice, we have been using 3D scanning technologies since 2015 and have measured over 200 projects by this method.
Until earlier this year we had exclusively used Faro scanners typically the X330, and for a couple of years had processed using Autodesk Recap. Faro Scene is excellent, but as we hire our kit, we needed a software solution that was available at all times, and affordable, Recap fits well.

Our rental supplier suggested we take a look at the Leica RTC360, which we did. In field registration using the Cycone field, and the VIS targetless registration were both very appealing, along with the very rapid scanning we were finding that time on site was almost half that of the Faro X range that we had been using previously.
There are as has been stated elsewhere negatives, these being –

1. No choice but to use the Cyclone software suite.
2. Bespoke memory stick.
3. Significantly larger data files.
4. Lack of dual axis compensation.

Point 3 wasn’t a massive issue, we have a dedicated monster of a machine to process scans, and although everything was slowed, it all worked, we could just leave imports overnight etc.
Point 4 was an issue that raised its head on most scans, we would set off perfectly levelling the scan for the first, assuming from that point that the VIS would work from that basepoint – oh no, often many scans into a project, it would suddenly kick up at an angle, with no way back except to start again.

Point 2 looks innocuous enough, but when hiring kit that needs to be returned next day, it results in having to download at the end of the day, and hope all is done before collection. With limited opportunity to check the data. The Faro uses standard memory cards, which meant we always had the raw scan data. This turned out to be a massive problem for us.

Point 1 is also a big issue for us, Cyclone 360 is quite cute, but is still very much under development and so for many functions the full product (being superseded by 360 I understand), also outputs are poor, so much so we could only achieve the data outputs we required, by saving as RTS to Recap and then outputting E57 data from Recap. This slowed the process significantly. It should also be said that Cyclone has a rather dated and less than intuitive interface, it feels like something from the 1990’s. With Recap we self taught, processing scan data is a simple process containing a handful of steps, I would expect to be able to self teach, but Cyclone is far from intuitive, that said, once up to speed it is pretty good apart from outputting as mentioned before.

Our big issue happened a few weeks ago, our last scan project – Scan completed we downloaded the data from the memory stick, to our server, and returned the kit next day. Trying to import the scans into Cyclone 360 we would experience crashes, typically after a couple of hours after starting the import. This repeated over the following couple of days, at which point I started to investigate. It became apparent that there had been an update to the Cyclone software (to V1.6). So I fished around for the update – nothing to be found on leica or myWorld sites, our rental company kindly sent us the upgrade. Following this the imports completed, however the two projects that I had attempted to import to the old version, had corrupted, they created two vast concentric hemisphere’s of points, making the scans unusable. The third project, which we had not attempted to import to the old Cyclone version, was fine.

Our rental company was very helpful, I had not deleted the scan data on the returned memory sticks, so their support team were able to process the non-corrupt data, and get it over to us, but unfortunately they do not work to our workflow, so we have been unable to use this. So have had to go back and re-measure the project.

Three very big issues here to me –

1. The bespoke memory stick, this really does not work in a rental model, I also understand they are £250 to replace, so probably not good for anyone!
2. How on earth in this day and age, does a software company not carry version data in their data files. This is quite unbelievable.
3. Why were we not informed of the upgrade?

A change of approach from any one of the above and we would have been fine. As it is, I have to say, we will never ever use Leica again.
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Re: RTC360 Not so great really

Post by Jamesrye »

4. Lack of dual axis compensation.
There's just no way around the fact that the tilt sensor in the RTC360 is IMU based with an accuracy of 3 minutes for any tilt. 3 minutes over 20 meters equates to 17mm.

"When is has to be right" - use a P40.
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Re: RTC360 Not so great really

Post by Matt Young »

I'm not recommending Leica to anyone again either. I do have a long history with their laser scanners. But this has gone too far.

I would recommend Faro over Leica now to anyone. They are way ahead in terms of usability and cost. And the scans actually look very good.

I now have around 2Tb of data to process in Cyclone 9.3.2. (for one project!). It's going to take weeks and weeks to get through. I understand later versions of Cyclone improve file sizes, but I cannot upgrade to a later version yet, for reasons I cannot discuss. I also cannot use a tablet. So I have loads of job001's with loads of scan001's. Managing the data is a nightmare.

The bottleneck in processing has utterly destroyed any fun I would have otherwise had.

I was led to believe that the RTC360 would automatically register data while you scan. It is in fact very poor at doing this. Most scans have to be re-processed in Cyclone. Fortunately I really know how to use Cyclone to do this, but it's so time consuming.

And making a USB stick only work with the scanner, for a few hundred pounds of extra profit! it's taking the p"$S really. It just has arrogance written all over it...
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Re: RTC360 Not so great really

Post by gary_lawes »

Jamesrye wrote: Thu Jul 25, 2019 2:40 pm
4. Lack of dual axis compensation.
There's just no way around the fact that the tilt sensor in the RTC360 is IMU based with an accuracy of 3 minutes for any tilt. 3 minutes over 20 meters equates to 17mm.

"When is has to be right" - use a P40.
Having read the thread covering tilt issues, I realise that the problems we were experiencing are nothing to to with the IMU accuracy, but some other issue, which I would assume was software related. For seemingly no reason, Cyclone field would kick the survey out of level, typically by about 5 -10 degree's. Never seemed to happen on the first scan, we never got to the bottom of when it would happen. The first time it happened we tried to keep going with the plan to correct when back at base, but Field reaches a point where it will no longer link the scans, I assume because the discrepancy between current scan and the survey model would grow to a point where it could no longer handle it. We would just have to start the survey over. Sometines a couple of times in a project. Seems that it is being sorted, although version 1.6 still had the issue.
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Re: RTC360 Not so great really

Post by Jamesrye »

Having read the thread covering tilt issues, I realise that the problems we were experiencing are nothing to to with the IMU accuracy, but some other issue, which I would assume was software related. For seemingly no reason, Cyclone field would kick the survey out of level, typically by about 5 -10 degree's.
Interesting, I didn't realise that there was an issue with Field 360 also. To be honest, there are lots of issues with the software at the moment. Cyclone is not correctly auto-extracting targets with the RTC360 (centres of targets are out of position) - so be aware of that. We also still see crashes when using the latest Nvidia cards.

We were using the scanner in standalone mode, but have been advised by Leica not to do this and to use the ipad in the field. Having said that, you can still use the standalone mode and do the pre-registration on the ipad later. But that pre-registration seems to be key to addressing the problem of tilted scans and ensuring that Cyclone will be able to successfully cloud link the data nicely. It seems that otherwise, Cyclone classic really struggles to create proper strong C2C links.
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Re: RTC360 Not so great really

Post by jamesworrell »

What works for me:

- no ipad - only use it to create jobs
- ingest to Register 360 - auto-targets only (C2C 1000/10)
- join bundles if necessary - but ideally scanning overlaps will hopefully make this redundant
- confirm targets - remove any false positives / eyeball target centre see if any look particularly bad on the preview
- audit each auto-created link - horizontal + vertical
- remove "long links" and re-link to more local scans - eg where you have double-backed down a hallway say
- close any loops - sometimes I bother
- name targets - way easier in Register 360
- optimise (no auto-add, no add suggested) and exit
- ingest to Cyclone Core
- copy registration - don't work on original
- register (C2C 400 iterations/75% cloud/0.15 search)
- turn down target weights to 0.001
- register - see if any targets blow out - re-pick if necessary
- turn targets up to 1; turn cloud links down to 0.1 weight
- register - see if any clouds blow out and fix if necessary
- turn all to 100% weight
- register - see if any links are still funky, fix if appropriate
- could freeze/audit at this point or perhaps copy
- auto-add cloud constraints (3% cloud / 0.2 search)
- register - see if all still on track
- optimise all cloud links (100% cloud/0.15 search)
- freeze and audit
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Re: RTC360 Not so great really

Post by MikeDailey »

jamesworrell wrote: Tue Jul 30, 2019 11:21 am
- ingest to Register 360 - auto-targets only (C2C 1000/10)
- join bundles if necessary - but ideally scanning overlaps will hopefully make this redundant
- confirm targets - remove any false positives / eyeball target centre see if any look particularly bad on the preview
- audit each auto-created link - horizontal + vertical
- remove "long links" and re-link to more local scans - eg where you have double-backed down a hallway say
- close any loops - sometimes I bother
- name targets - way easier in Register 360
- optimise (no auto-add, no add suggested) and exit
- ingest to Cyclone Core
- copy registration - don't work on original
Agreed with assigning targets in reg360. Do/did you have any issues with bringing the Reg360 job into core? When I tried, it only brought the target vertices with it, not the labels I had assigned.
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Re: RTC360 Not so great really

Post by jamesworrell »

MikeDailey wrote: Tue Jul 30, 2019 12:01 pm Agreed with assigning targets in reg360. Do/did you have any issues with bringing the Reg360 job into core? When I tried, it only brought the target vertices with it, not the labels I had assigned.
You running versions in Register 360 by chance? I have had a bug where I get old versions of the R360 job come over as opposed to what I thought was the current version. I thought I was going nuts! And target names was something that didn't come across.

I found that if I created a new version, activated that version, deleted all old versions - I got the right version.

I don't bother with versions anymore either.
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