Leica Cyclone R360 Workflow

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gsisman
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Re: Leica Cyclone R360 Workflow

Post by gsisman »

markscan wrote: Thu Dec 19, 2019 3:13 pm
pburrows145 wrote: Thu Dec 19, 2019 12:08 pm The next version (end Jan) will provide set-up export for RCP in REG360 BLK Edition, and REG360 with Cyclone PUBLISHER Pro.
Any chance to get merge (BLK) projects and, above all, USB data transfer from Field360?
Mark

There is another thread with a Lightning to Ethernet solution which we have used, however, I am not sure the actual IMPORT to REG 360 is faster than over a very fast WIFI. The reading of the Field 360 files an Pre-alignment links is much faster than Wifi though (at least running through the BLK Wifi server with Field 360. We have not gotten BLK FW v1.2.4 to work properly with Field 360 or the iPAD connection to the F360 App. We are still using v1.2.3.
Also if you want the Archived RAW *.BLK scanfiles (which we do), You still have to download through the BLK WIFI using the BLK Data Manager ,which is turtle slow by todays standards
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Re: Leica Cyclone R360 Workflow

Post by markscan »

gsisman wrote: Thu Dec 19, 2019 9:19 pm Mark

There is another thread with a Lightning to Ethernet solution which we have used, however, I am not sure the actual IMPORT to REG 360 is faster than over a very fast WIFI. The reading of the Field 360 files an Pre-alignment links is much faster than Wifi though (at least running through the BLK Wifi server with Field 360. We have not gotten BLK FW v1.2.4 to work properly with Field 360 or the iPAD connection to the F360 App. We are still using v1.2.3.
Also if you want the Archived RAW *.BLK scanfiles (which we do), You still have to download through the BLK WIFI using the BLK Data Manager ,which is turtle slow by todays standards
Yeah, I know, sorry for this double posting, but understand me :).
After two years of BLK360 usage and after spending money on a very good laser scanner, I really can’t find one reason about this imposed limitation. My only “weapon” is to ask Leica’s staff until I’ll find an answer, again, sorry Paul form multiple requests.

It’s not about the BLK360, I’m totally fine transferring data via WiFi from the scanner, it’s about the workflow from field to publish (topic of this post). Now that ReCap is not developed anymore (it’s a fact) the need of a wired data transfer or of an optimized data transfer is even more necessary.
It’s nice to have a wireless option, comfortable for small surveys maybe.

I did a 708 setups survey last week, it took hours of WiFi transferring. After that I stumbled on a Field360-Reg360 processing bug and, with the help of Leica support people, I had to repeat the transferring again 6 times until we found a workaround. I lost 4.5 days of work.
While the last WiFi standards are very good for transferring files, when we speak about pointcloud it’s about tons of GB (as we all know), so no, USB 3 it’s still better and preferred.

Probably a good alternative would be that Leica perfects the transferring process: instead of transferring and processing one setup at a time could be convenient to first transferring all setups then processing them even without the Field360 server connection.
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Re: Leica Cyclone R360 Workflow

Post by gsisman »

markscan wrote: Fri Dec 20, 2019 8:20 am
gsisman wrote: Thu Dec 19, 2019 9:19 pm Mark

There is another thread with a Lightning to Ethernet solution which we have used, however, I am not sure the actual IMPORT to REG 360 is faster than over a very fast WIFI. The reading of the Field 360 files an Pre-alignment links is much faster than Wifi though (at least running through the BLK Wifi server with Field 360. We have not gotten BLK FW v1.2.4 to work properly with Field 360 or the iPAD connection to the F360 App. We are still using v1.2.3.
Also if you want the Archived RAW *.BLK scanfiles (which we do), You still have to download through the BLK WIFI using the BLK Data Manager ,which is turtle slow by todays standards
Yeah, I know, sorry for this double posting, but understand me :).
After two years of BLK360 usage and after spending money on a very good laser scanner, I really can’t find one reason about this imposed limitation. My only “weapon” is to ask Leica’s staff until I’ll find an answer, again, sorry Paul form multiple requests.

It’s not about the BLK360, I’m totally fine transferring data via WiFi from the scanner, it’s about the workflow from field to publish (topic of this post). Now that ReCap is not developed anymore (it’s a fact) the need of a wired data transfer or of an optimized data transfer is even more necessary.
It’s nice to have a wireless option, comfortable for small surveys maybe.

I did a 708 setups survey last week, it took hours of WiFi transferring. After that I stumbled on a Field360-Reg360 processing bug and, with the help of Leica support people, I had to repeat the transferring again 6 times until we found a workaround. I lost 4.5 days of work.
While the last WiFi standards are very good for transferring files, when we speak about pointcloud it’s about tons of GB (as we all know), so no, USB 3 it’s still better and preferred.

Probably a good alternative would be that Leica perfects the transferring process: instead of transferring and processing one setup at a time could be convenient to first transferring all setups then processing them even without the Field360 server connection.
Mark,


Yes I think you are on to a better workflow process. Although transfer on the BLK to F360 app can happen in about the time it takes to actually take a full res scan with HDR (6;60 min.) and then quickly align it. The bottleneck is the office downloads. The lightning to ethernet is theoretically 1GB so downloading all the BLK data on the iPAD Pro (Including the pre-alignment links and the BLK scan data in BLK RAW form simlar to the RTC360 Download workflow) would be much faster and allow the archive copy of the RAW files to be obtained in one download function. Once it's downloaded it could follow the same workflow that shows up on the Pre-align links tree in the left panel. Since it has those links established already you would think it could perform multi-threaded C2C between mutliple linked pairs of cloud stations and the alternately through the connecting links, instead of the apparent linear links it works through as it imports BLK Pre-aligned data
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Re: Leica Cyclone R360 Workflow

Post by markscan »

I went deep on this import process thing.
Found out that WiFi 802.11n is not so bad at wireless data transfer, still slower than USB 3 but quick enough.
Of course quicker if you cast the WiFi directly from your PC (Win 10 Hosted WiFi network mode).

Our problem is that Reg360 import and processes 1 setup at a time, forcing you to block your iPad with the sync server active.
In order to improve this import workflow, Reg360 should:
1. Read the Field360 sync server database without sitemaps previews (in order to speed up the first sync);
2. Import the selected sitemaps (Field360 projects) without processing them yet;
3. With the iPad sync server disconnected, or anyway in a second moment, process all the imported setups.

This would permit to use the iPad+BLK360 scanning around while you leave the PC processing.
A complementary solution is to let Reg360 read a manually imported (from iTunes) Field360 database, but again, the processing steps must occur without sync server connected.

.blk files are quite useless. I mean, while it's always a good thing keeping original scans as backup, you can keep them inside the BLK360 itself and delete them after you triple check the Reg360 import went fine, then you backup the Reg360 project, or save a version of it.
Remember that another copy of the scans are on Field360.

- A .blk file contains a very compressed setup, light to transfer, even via WiFi;
- Field360 projects consist in partially decompressed setups to perform preview and Field360 pre-alignments;
- Reg360 projects are fully decompressed setups, and that's why you need to perform C2C alignments after the Field360 pre-alignments.

I'm quite sure there's no need to tie Reg360 decompressing and processing to the import from Field360 step.
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Re: Leica Cyclone R360 Workflow

Post by gsisman »

markscan wrote: Mon Dec 23, 2019 1:11 pm I went deep on this import process thing.
Found out that WiFi 802.11n is not so bad at wireless data transfer, still slower than USB 3 but quick enough.
Of course quicker if you cast the WiFi directly from your PC (Win 10 Hosted WiFi network mode).

Our problem is that Reg360 import and processes 1 setup at a time, forcing you to block your iPad with the sync server active.
In order to improve this import workflow, Reg360 should:
1. Read the Field360 sync server database without sitemaps previews (in order to speed up the first sync);
2. Import the selected sitemaps (Field360 projects) without processing them yet;
3. With the iPad sync server disconnected, or anyway in a second moment, process all the imported setups.

This would permit to use the iPad+BLK360 scanning around while you leave the PC processing.
A complementary solution is to let Reg360 read a manually imported (from iTunes) Field360 database, but again, the processing steps must occur without sync server connected.

.blk files are quite useless. I mean, while it's always a good thing keeping original scans as backup, you can keep them inside the BLK360 itself and delete them after you triple check the Reg360 import went fine, then you backup the Reg360 project, or save a version of it.
Remember that another copy of the scans are on Field360.

- A .blk file contains a very compressed setup, light to transfer, even via WiFi;
- Field360 projects consist in partially decompressed setups to perform preview and Field360 pre-alignments;
- Reg360 projects are fully decompressed setups, and that's why you need to perform C2C alignments after the Field360 pre-alignments.

I'm quite sure there's no need to tie Reg360 decompressing and processing to the import from Field360 step.
Mark
Looks like you've tested a lot.
We've had our scanner about the same time (dec 3 2017) and beat our head on the wall many times since.
Question- have you proven that item #1 above -displaying the Fld 360 sitemaps slows down the process. In our case my experience shows the Reg 360 doing some kind of Cache (in the temp folder?) as it's READING the FLD 360 DB's and then displaying all at once on the Screen in the Left panel and the View panel.
One nice thing would be allow checking on or off specific setups within the bundles/sitemaps to decide if you wanted to create separte bundles in a sitemap. This has been requested from Leica multiple times.
Separating the import and processing tasks away from connection to Field360 & iPAD would be a definite plus. It sounds like you've done a lot more massive scan groups than we have, although we have quite a repertoire of scenarios. Have you found that the overall time of import and process is less with Field 360 than using a backmap and Smart align options with the RAW BLK file imports. I'm not sure I'm convinced yet..
I've even tested that slightly by taking a screen capture of my FLD 360 project sitemap view on the iPAD and then importing it for a manual basemap to align my cached BLK files by Smartalign placement on top of the image/processing by timestamp, which is basically the way we run a FLD360 project linearly in the field
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Re: Leica Cyclone R360 Workflow

Post by markscan »

gsisman wrote: Tue Dec 24, 2019 1:18 am Question- have you proven that item #1 above -displaying the Fld 360 sitemaps slows down the process. In our case my experience shows the Reg 360 doing some kind of Cache (in the temp folder?) as it's READING the FLD 360 DB's and then displaying all at once on the Screen in the Left panel and the View panel.
Exactly, I have the same feeling. The fact is that, in order to preview the whole Field360 DB, Reg360 needs to fully read it, and, if a Field360 DB is many GB heavy... it takes time.
Reading project names and bundles names only should speed up the pre-import step. Less fancy but faster.
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Re: Leica Cyclone R360 Workflow

Post by ericguizzetti »

geomontgomery wrote: Wed Dec 18, 2019 3:02 pm I thought Register 360 BLK Edition exported as rcp natively? Then you could just bypass Recap and open the *.rcp directly in AutoCAD, where I'd suggest you use Leica Cloudworx for AutoCAD to work with and manipulate the cloud further.
Image
Not only does it open naively its gets rid of those annoying blackish outlines.
REgister360_TO_RECAP.jpg
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Re: Leica Cyclone R360 Workflow

Post by ericguizzetti »

c2a wrote: Wed Dec 18, 2019 2:05 pm Do you know of a good workflow for Cyclone R360? I have the BLK Edition.

I'm scanning a 650,000-sqft, 14-story condo project and I've been capturing and registering in Cyclone. I then export registered E57s of each new 16,000-sqft section. I then import the new E57s into Recap to coordinate with existing sections and export as RCS for drafting. But, Recap hangs. I've tried using regions and I have tried deleting all other points but I think Recap cannot handle a certain number of scans (despite all of their points deleted). So I am looking to completely abandon Recap and do it all in Cyclone.

Any workflows, online tutorials, classes or other resources would be great, if you know any. Thanks.
1. Do you have control on the Project?
2. Are you using targets outside doorways in the stairwells

If it was me I'd do the following
1. Set 4 targest inside each stair landing and outside each stair landing doorway. Go as far as to name that Building # and STair # plus level#
2. Scan the stair towers
3. Scan each floor seperately
4. import each section into reg360 separately on its own sitemap
5. Tie the targets at each stair landings to the appropriate targets outside of stairwells keeping them on seperate sitemaps
6. Export each site map by itself directly into recap with purblisher pro
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