One of the formats we ended up using is cleverly named XYZ. Once you import them, point clouds come in twos, because ARCHICAD generates two files. They are also one of the few multistory GDL elements whose size on the floor plan may vary from story to story. Point clouds are enormous in size compared to other objects millions of points can take up gigabytes of disk space and memory. Points as a type of geometry did not exist before everything was made out of either 2D or 3D sub-elements. The point cloud feature in ARCHICAD is a first in many ways. We chose two that are independent and started to implement them in ARCHICAD. This rather simple set of data is carried by various file types almost every hardware provider has its own. In some cases, color is simply discarded: the 3D information and intensity values are enough to distinguish between points for modeling. It became apparent to us that a third type of value, intensity, is also used to represent the grayscale spectrum. The idea of point clouds is simple: it is an array of points in 3D, each of which is assigned X, Y, Z coordinates and RGB color values. Now that the hardware has become more affordable for smaller firms as well, it was time for ARCHICAD to gain a foothold in this area. Architecture firms worldwide believe that instead of spending money on the slow and expensive method of hand surveying, it is cheaper, more reliable and definitely faster to create point cloud models.
Remote sensing is now used to analyze not only terrains but also smaller scale objects: streets, buildings, interiors, and engineering details. Known for decades as geographical information system (GIS), this technology has recently made a significant impact on architectural representation and surveying. While planning the new features of ARCHICAD 19, we quickly realized that a rapidly developing area in architecture has been missing from previous versions. Having surveyed historic buildings by hand, making point clouds usable directly in ARCHICAD was particularly important to him. Prior to joining GRAPHISOFT, he p racticed as an architect, mainly working on historic preservation projects. Ferenc has an MArch from Budapest University of Technology and Economics and an MS Arch from DAAP at the University of Cincinnati. This post is by Ferenc Traser, a Product Designer at GRAPHISOFT.