Overview
A metal-processing plant in Hamilton, Ontario, needed to move. Not the building, the machines in it. The owner wanted to reposition the fabrication line and bring in new equipment, and the only drawings of the plant were the ones it was built from, decades and several layouts ago. Before anyone could say where a new machine would fit, or whether the crane could still reach it, they needed the building as it actually stood: columns, trusses, crane rails, the line, and every machine on the floor, in one model.
That is an as-built job, but it is an industrial one, and industrial as-builts are their own discipline. The scan has to happen around production. The point cloud has to capture ten-plus machines that don’t exist in any Revit library. And the model has to be accurate enough, at the columns and the crane, that a layout decision made on screen holds on the floor.
The building
About 280 feet long and 50 feet wide, 1,510 square metres, one long bay. Steel columns along both long walls carrying single-span roof trusses, with a portal crane running the length of the bay for moving stock and product. Down the middle, the fabrication line, and around it more than ten specialised machines, most of them one-offs with non-standard shapes that a catalogue family will never match.
Scanning inside a working plant
Industrial scanning is a different job from scanning an empty building. The floor is busy, the sightlines are broken by machines and stock, and the things you need most, the column bases, the crane rails, the machine footprints and the clearances between them, are exactly the things that are hardest to see from any one spot.
So the approach is density and coverage rather than speed. Terrestrial scanner, about 112 stations down the length of the bay, set close to the machines so every face is captured, and enough overlap that the registration holds down the full length of the bay. The crane rails and the columns get stations from both sides, because they are the reference everything else gets measured against. The plant kept working around us; the scan was planned around the line, not the other way around.
As-cast, not as-drawn
Everything on this job is measured from the building as it was cast and erected, not from the original drawings. Column positions, floor levels, crane rail heights and the true footprint of every machine come from the point cloud. That matters more in a plant than almost anywhere else, because machinery layout works to inches of clearance, and a column 50 mm from where the drawing shows it is the difference between a machine fitting and not.
The model
The point cloud went into Revit and came out as an LOD 350 model of the whole plant: the steel structure and roof trusses, the architectural shell, the portal crane, and the fabrication line and machines. The machines were the hard part. There are no families for equipment like this, so they were modelled in place from the point cloud, freeform where the geometry demanded it, with repeating elements arrayed rather than drawn ten times. The result is a machine in the model that has the same footprint and the same envelope as the machine on the floor, which is all a layout study needs from it.
Drag the handle: the crane bay as scanned, and as modelled.
From the model came the drawing set: two floor plans, five cross-sections through the bay, interior elevations and a reflected ceiling plan showing the trusses and crane rails. The point cloud itself went to the owner in a browser viewer so anyone on their team could open the plant and measure a clearance without asking.
The outcome
The owner had a plant they could plan in. Moving the line, adding a machine, checking whether the crane could still reach the new position, checking a clearance against a column, all of it could be done on the model and trusted, and when they needed a drawing of the new layout it came straight off the same geometry. One scan, one model, every layout question since.
What we learned
In a plant, the columns and the crane are the survey. Get them from both sides and register everything to them.
Model machines to their envelope, not their engineering. A layout study needs the footprint and the clearance, not the bolts. LOD 350 on the structure, envelope-accurate on the equipment, is the right split.
Give the owner the point cloud in a viewer. Layout questions keep coming for years, and most of them are a clearance somebody can measure themselves.
Moving machines in a plant that can’t stop? Have a look at our industrial laser scanning and Scan-to-BIM services, or 3D laser scanning across Ontario.
