Background

With over 800 employees in offices across Canada, BBA is a private consulting engineering firm that offers engineering, environmental and field services backed by advanced expertise to the Energy, Mining and metals, Oil, gas and biofuels sectors. The company has developed expertise in 3D surveying and regularly undertakes large-scale laser scanning projects of electrical substations, control buildings, plants and mills.

“As an engineering firm, we often need to perform 3D scan surveys to use within our projects” comments Mario Laflamme, BBA’s Development Manager for CAD and 3D Scan Technologies. “Today’s scanners are generating bigger point clouds faster, however the challenge is to share this data to make it easily accessible to everyone. This challenge was easily overcome using the Cintoo Cloud platform.”

Cintoo Cloud provides a unique point cloud-to-surface technology, to convert high-precision terrestrial laser scans into a 3D surface mesh before uploading to the cloud. The mesh reduces the file size by 20 and 30 times without reducing data accuracy. It can also revert the mesh data back into its original format so it can be used directly in CAD software, with the same accuracy as the original point cloud file.

Using Cintoo Cloud, BBA’s scan data becomes shareable, collaborative and distributable amongst employees, contractors or clients, who can access the 3D projects from any location via their own laptop. Cintoo Cloud also provides users with tools such as team member invitations, permissions, assignments, annotations, calendar and notifications. It also provides integrated scan-BIM model comparison functionalities and scan-to-BIM workflows.

“Cintoo Cloud is a game changer for BBA” says Mario Laflamme, “It allows our clients and our own teams to collaborate directly on a Reality Capture project regardless of their physical location. BBA has a dozen offices across Canada, so being able to work on the same laser scan data via the cloud saves us an enormous amount of time and resources”.