Post processing Software for Faro S 3D Scanner

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Peter Blake
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Re: Post processing Software for Faro S 3D Scanner

Post by Peter Blake »

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Last edited by Peter Blake on Mon Mar 23, 2020 11:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Post processing Software for Faro S 3D Scanner

Post by jedfrechette »

Peter Blake wrote: Mon Mar 23, 2020 7:40 am The support for FARO Scene in Australia is appalling. Even with a FARO scanner try another software. Instead of improving the base program "SCENE", every feature you need is sold as a stupid separate "rip off" program.
Well as long as I've been using it does seem like their software development roadmap has been:

1. Make a HTML wizard
2. Acquire other companies.

So I guess that sentiment is understandable.
Jed
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Re: Post processing Software for Faro S 3D Scanner

Post by SAttaya »

jedfrechette wrote: Thu Mar 19, 2020 2:59 pm ...
Scene is fine for what it is, very basic registration and data interrogation. It is pretty fast for ingesting and roughly aligning scans, however, depending on your tolerances and requirements it may not offer enough control over the process. More than a few of us use it as a preprocessing step before taking the scans in to another software to finish alignments. ...

There are a few software options out there that will work, so just because you have Faro hardware don't feel like you need to use their software if it doesn't do what you need.
Jed,
Would you (and/or others) recommend/specify what you use after scene to finish alignments:
* designx
* cyclone (register)
* recap
* other????
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Re: Post processing Software for Faro S 3D Scanner

Post by jashby »

The best registration (for bigger environments than a single room) I’ve ever got out of Faro Scene was about 6mm for an interior. And even then there were some walls that were incorrectly aligned. The same Faro data run through Cyclone got 2mm.

I no longer use Scene.

Scene is also only really good if your scans auto align, and if you ever scanned a slightly symmetrical environment you’ll find Scene just throws everything on top of each other. Useless.

While there is more manual registration with Cyclone it’s a really fast workflow once you assign some (sane) hotkeys.

I registered 70 scans manually in top down view in Cyclone in a little over 2 hours. Last time I tried to do the same in Scene it took about a week.

J.
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Re: Post processing Software for Faro S 3D Scanner

Post by jedfrechette »

SAttaya wrote: Wed Mar 25, 2020 6:44 pmwhat you use after scene to finish alignments
PolyWorks. After all this time it's still the most powerful. It has it's share of issues though.
jashby wrote: Wed Mar 25, 2020 7:06 pmScene is also only really good if your scans auto align
I completely agree.

Our informal rule is that if you've spent more than 15 minutes trying to fix a broken alignment in SCENE it's time to get the data out of SCENE and into software where there is more control. This actually makes SCENE a good preprocessor for PolyWorks, SCENE does the easy part of the alignment quickly and PolyWorks gives us the tools to verify the alignment, improve it, and when necessary salvage even the most poorly scanned projects.

That's an expensive and complex process to maintain though and one I'm actively looking at simplifying. I'd love to do everything in SCENE, but unless it's tools and UI improve significantly I don't anticipate that being feasible for us. We've already reduced the number of SCENE seats we keep under maintenance and eventually will probably end up migrating to either Cyclone or RealWorks.
Jed
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Re: Post processing Software for Faro S 3D Scanner

Post by Scott »

There are many posts about Scene (.rcp) exports > ReCap > Revit. I have a return client (rapidly aging :), trying to launch a 16gb project into ReCap/Revit.
Is there link to a (decent) cookbook approach recipe to help him get out of Autodesk purgatory?
Cheers,
~S
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Re: Post processing Software for Faro S 3D Scanner

Post by mikajahkola »

Mind wrote: Wed Mar 18, 2020 7:54 am If you are using Faro S series laser scanner then go with Scene or Realworks because both of them can read and apply Faro S or X series inclinometer data. Cyclone can no do this with Faro scanners so your scans will be unleveled.
My vote goes to Realworks. Our projects consist of a large number of Faro scans with a relatively short range like indoor scans or small facades.
Realworks has a bit of a learning curve but once you figure out how to work with registration groups it will give you very clean cloud-to-cloud results.

I think Cyclone Register 360 does read the levelling information from fls files but it does not use it efficiently as a constraint for c-c registration. Instead, it levels the whole registered cloud based on the average of all scans. At least this was the case when we tested it early 2019. By the way, Scene is no better in this respect.

Realworks by default assumes that all scans are level. This is a good strategy if you are processing survey grade leveled scans like those from Trimble TX scanners. On indoor distances it works surprisingly well even with Faro data, because even the coarse inclinometer of Faro is more accurate than a floor or ceiling surface in the point cloud 2 meters away.
If you really want accurate c-c registration, you should consider Scantra. We did a brief test using data from an old problem project, and the results were impressive. Scantra also gives you meaningful estimates of the registration errors.
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