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Trimble scanning system
Posted by bradl on October 18, 2018 at 3:14 pmHoping to get some feedback about the Trimble TX8, Realworks, TBC scanning module and the Edgewise software.
More specifically, quality of scan and photos from TX8, ease of registering scans, creating linework in TBC using point cloud data and the modeling point clouds in Edgewise.
Looking to purchase, their cost is reasonable and trying to prevent buyers remorse
Thanks in advance,
Brad
john-hamilton replied 5 years, 6 months ago 5 Members · 9 Replies- 9 Replies
I can only speak on the TBC portion. We process SX10 data using TBC but we extract the line work using Civil3d or Microstation. Civil3d has really improved their handling of scan data.
If using TBC to process the scan data, it’s pretty clunky until you get to release 4.1 so I would start there. Tools and interface improvements (on the back end) really have helped handling the larger data sets.T. Nelson – SAM, LLCWe use RealWorks to process TX8 data. We also have an SX10, for simple scans we use TBC, for more sophisticated work we use RW for that as well.
RW has a long learning curve to get proficient.
Thank you both for your replies.
John, are you satisfied with registering process for large scans? Have you used the TX8 and RW to model building interiors?
The scan processing is the only office work I do not do myself, I have one employee and he has taken the time to really learn RW. I know he sometimes struggles registering a lot of scans together.
We recently scanned the inside of an (empty) Toy R Us store, the floor had a huge upward bulge in the middle. We used the TX8 for that, and were able to get all of the columns, walls, etc. and a dense survey of the floor.
We are also doing a 2X/day scan of a failing wall on the river, that is much easier to do with the SX10 because the survey workflow means no registration is required. Setup on a known point, take a backsight far away, and scan. Bring it into TBC, and from each scan we create a dwg of the top front edge of the sheet pile wall, so we need to have repeatable scans. If we were to use the TX8 we could only use spheres, and they cannot be too far away. They would have to be on another wall which is also suspect of moving because of the nearby failing wall. So with the SX10 we can have the control further away.
I have an SX10 and do all of the processing in TBC. The SX10 is great; with good hardware and procedures you can perform resections or run very tight traverses and have scans that align extremely well. If you have intervisible control you can also turn multiple sets of angles and perform a LSA in TBC to tighten things up a bit.
I’ve only done one job with the TX8 and RW, it involved 76 scans in an extremely congested environment. RW is not intuitive, there’s a definite learning curve; a day or two of training from someone skilled in it will more than pay for itself in time and frustration. I found that it did a very good job of detecting spheres and targets and registering to them, and I thought it’s ability to model a sphere that it could only see part of was phenomenal. There were instances where only a sliver of the sphere was in view, but once I “showed” RW where it was it modeled it perfectly. This was a time consuming and somewhat tedious process (looking through each scan for targets that weren’t auto identified) but it tightened the registration up quite a lot. I also had to do a lot of plane to plane registration, and that seems to work well, it started to pick up some higher residuals but we’re typically talking about a hundredth or less.
The only drawback I found was that the TX8 camera does not produce image files or panoramas, it’s only used to colorize the scans. If you want photos or better colorization you have to use an external camera. I would hope that at some point this will change, ideally via software upgrade. But other than that I liked using the TX8; the data is very clean and I was able to send out a crew with little to no scanning experience after training them for an hour or so and they had no problem capturing and bringing back a very good data set. We learned a ton from that project and the next one we do will go smoother.
We didn’t use RW to do the modeling, only to register and export the scans.
Our TX8 is an earlier model without onboard camera. I have a 24 MP camera and a mount that puts the camera in the same location as the scanner. I prefer this setup as I can upgrade the camera to a higher resolution in the future.
If we stay with the TX8 that’s the route we’ll go as well. The onboard camera doesn’t do a good enough job, the exposure isn’t balanced.
Do you use a panoramic camera? Do you mind telling me the make & model?
We use TBC, RW and Trident for our Faro and MX-2 data. RW is really sweet and the new TBC does a really good job with the linework. We also use Recap with the C3D workflow.
Nikon D5300 camera. Lens is a Sigma FishEye (8 mm 1:3.5). The mount is a Nodal Ninja R1, which goes on the tribrach and is at the same location as the scanner “origin”. We take 6 pics spaced at 60?ø.
We don’t always use the camera, but the pics are very useful to have even if not doing orthos or coloring the point cloud, just makes it easier to classify things.
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