Point Clouds for education - suggestions?

[Scott.Warren]

Hey Folks,

I wanted to work with some of the local High Schools in town, and get them some of their buildings scanned for Students to consume. Tricky part is of course there is little funding available for a suite of software for whole class. Does anyone have experience with getting data into the hands of people using free software? Without access to the usual Autodesk software like Recap/revit, I'm working if Sketchup is a good option?

I'd ideally want to have a point cloud able to be modeled with simple tools. Enough to get feet wet, and hopefully get some inventive people into the industry early.

Let me know your thoughts.

All the best,
Scott Warren

[Peyman Bashiri]

Hello Scott,
Why don`t you use Auto desk educational license for Recap and Auto cad or Revit? I can share a lot of Recap files for your students.
Peyman

[Scott.Warren]

Hey Peyman,

Thanks for the info, for some reason I thought the Educational licenses carried a cost, but I guess they don't for schools?!

I'm gonna investigate this further, if these students can get access to Revit/Recap, that would be pretty rad.

If I hammer this out I'd love to reach out for some examples to supplement my stuff. I think it be neat for schools to have a 3D sample of a part of their own building for the students to work with. If i had something like that when I was in HS, might have changed my career path a little.

Word,
Scott

[gsisman]

Hey Peyman,

Thanks for the info, for some reason I thought the Educational licenses carried a cost, but I guess they don't for schools?!

I'm gonna investigate this further, if these students can get access to Revit/Recap, that would be pretty rad.

If I hammer this out I'd love to reach out for some examples to supplement my stuff. I think it be neat for schools to have a 3D sample of a part of their own building for the students to work with. If i had something like that when I was in HS, might have changed my career path a little.

Word,
Scott

Scott, you can get a lot of resources for training purposes. Software can not be used for commercial purposes. This works for a lot of kinds of software. They want young users to know their products. I taught a bunch of middle & High school homeschoolers a couple years ago.... https://youtu.be/UCMM8kE7QQ4

[landmeterbeuckx]

Hey Peyman,

Thanks for the info, for some reason I thought the Educational licenses carried a cost, but I guess they don't for schools?!

I'm gonna investigate this further, if these students can get access to Revit/Recap, that would be pretty rad.

If I hammer this out I'd love to reach out for some examples to supplement my stuff. I think it be neat for schools to have a 3D sample of a part of their own building for the students to work with. If i had something like that when I was in HS, might have changed my career path a little.

Word,
Scott

Scott,

I have tons of data which can be used. Houses, shops, churches, roads, construction sites.
Give me a yell and i will provide some.

Lieven

[mariusP]

Hey Folks,

I wanted to work with some of the local High Schools in town, and get them some of their buildings scanned for Students to consume. Tricky part is of course there is little funding available for a suite of software for whole class. Does anyone have experience with getting data into the hands of people using free software? Without access to the usual Autodesk software like Recap/revit, I'm working if Sketchup is a good option?

I'd ideally want to have a point cloud able to be modeled with simple tools. Enough to get feet wet, and hopefully get some inventive people into the industry early.

Let me know your thoughts.

All the best,
Scott Warren

Hi Scott,

If will go with Autodesk products, you should contact the local distributors. I do know that software is free for universities and colleges, but regarding High Schools, we haven’t had a need to take interest yet.

If you will go with SketchUp, we have special education pricing (Undet for SketchUp). You can write me a PM, and we’ll definitely come up with something.

[gord]

Hey Folks,

I wanted to work with some of the local High Schools in town, and get them some of their buildings scanned for Students to consume. Tricky part is of course there is little funding available for a suite of software for whole class. Does anyone have experience with getting data into the hands of people using free software? Without access to the usual Autodesk software like Recap/revit, I'm working if Sketchup is a good option?

I'd ideally want to have a point cloud able to be modeled with simple tools. Enough to get feet wet, and hopefully get some inventive people into the industry early.

Let me know your thoughts.

All the best,
Scott Warren

May not be as feature rich .. but for exploring and learning I think there are some good open source offerings :

- Blender can apparently now import point clouds, and has rapidly growing bim plugin support
- CloudCompare is an open source pointcloud viewer
- FreeCad has basic architectural modelling

Lots of videos on youtube showing features etc.

Good on you for getting students to dive in and learn about this stuff !

gord.

[Mike Annear]

Rhino 3D, I use it every day for modeling from pointclouds.
It is relatively cheap, very easy to learn with great support.
They have a huge discount for schools,
https://www.rhino3d.com/edu/
Cheers,
Mike.

[theatreworkUK]

Great initiative.

+1 Rhino

Veesus have a fantastic plug in for rhino that brings points directly into the workspace.

I'd be interested to learn about any blender plug ins and how they perform.


Also very interested in plug ins for Unity!

Thanks for the thread : )

S.

[Mike Annear]

Hi Stephen,
Keep in mind that you don't actually need the Veesus plugin to work with pointclouds in Rhino up to about 150,000,000 points.
The Veesus plugin is fantastic if you need to work with pointclouds larger than that.
I tried Blender, it works pretty well, but I am not a fan of the interface.

Regards,
Mike.