The end of one story, the start of the next

This is the last part of the story. In the previous part I told how the scanning years began, and how the idea of lightweight software took root and never let go. This part is about what happened next: from doing the work to managing it, and why you only see where time and money leak away once you take a step back.

At some point I also became project manager of the 3D laser scanning department, and the scanning simply went on: all over the world, for fifteen years. I enjoyed every bit of it, and I look back on those years with a good feeling. But leading the department does change how you look at the work. As a scanner you see one project: the site, the scanner, the point cloud. As a project manager you see all of them side by side, and then you start to see the pattern.

After all those years I knew that pattern far too well. You can make scanning as fast as you like, but as long as the processing is done by hand, that is where your margin leaks away. The problem was never the scanning. It was the step after it.

That realisation, together with years of frustration about heavy, expensive and unstable software, finally made me build what I had been thinking about since my first scans: a lightweight AutoCAD plug-in. It was modest. You still had to extract most of the piping and steel by hand. But it worked, and it ran light and stable, exactly as I had in mind.

It didn't stay modest for long. The plug-in grew into PointCloudSolutions: a free Base Tools module to bring the point cloud into AutoCAD, with Piping, Construct, Floor Analysis and Volume on top. Every module solved a problem I had run into myself on real projects. And my years at the internet agency paid off: the website, the webshop, the licensing and the installer were all things I could build myself.

But a plug-in stays a plug-in. You depend on AutoCAD: on the version, on the licence, and on how well it handles a large point cloud. I couldn't test on every AutoCAD version, and I didn't want my software to depend on one CAD package. At the same time the question from clients was changing. Fewer people wanted a 2D drawing or a loose 3D shape. More and more they wanted a BIM model: real objects with properties that you can keep working with in Revit.

That is where PCS Studio came from. It is a standalone program for point clouds, without AutoCAD underneath, built from the start with BIM as the goal. Auto Extract finds the piping in the scan, and Smart Connect joins it with bends, tees and reducers. What is left, you finish with tools that do exactly what you expect. The same goes for steel, cable trays and ducting. The result goes straight to Revit, or to AutoCAD Plant 3D if the project needs it. From scan to BIM, without the manual step that always ate the margin. Alongside it came BIMcheck, to check models once they are made.

I'm making that same move myself. After fifteen years of scanning and project management, I started as BIM Adviser at Medisch Spectrum Twente. Scanning is still part of the job: I still capture the existing situation, but now I also help put that information to good use in BIM. I keep developing PCS Studio alongside it.

Looking back, it all started with a home computer and a dial-in bulletin board. Construction and computers have been running side by side ever since, and with PCS Studio they have finally come together. This is where the founder story ends, and where the next one begins.

Want to see how it works in practice? In an ongoing video series I show step by step how a real scan becomes a complete model. The first three parts are online now, and more are on the way. Watch the series on YouTube