Your point cloud is not a deliverable
A 2.8 billion point E57 registration is an archive, not a product. Everything useful happens in classification, decimation and publishing — and that is the work most scanning quotes leave out.
Clients regularly arrive holding a hard drive. Someone scanned their plant two years ago, delivered 340 GB of E57, and nobody has opened it since because opening it requires a workstation and a licence.
The scan was fine. The delivery was incomplete. A registered cloud is roughly the halfway point of the work, and it is the point at which most survey contracts end.
What is missing: classification, so you can hide vegetation and isolate pipework. Moving-object removal, so the forklift that drove through scan 14 is not permanently rendered as a ghost. An octree publication, so it opens in a browser tab in two seconds instead of a workstation in twenty minutes. And derivatives — the meshed version for the CAD seats, the IFC for the BIM model.
When you buy capture, specify the publication, not the capture. Ask what opens it, on what hardware, and how long it takes. Ask who can use the deliverable without a licence. Those questions change the quote and they change what you actually receive.
Written by the capture team at 3D.MBA, Ahmedabad.
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