Where are you located?

The answers to these questions will depend heavily on what market you are in, what part of the world, etc.

You may have some luck calling or emailing local companies that are actively trying to sell these services. They might lie, so get a few different quotes.

Also consider liability - if you just need "guy with laser scanner" to give you rough 3d context for design work, he will cost less than "professional survey company" that will provide a file with some liability / accuracy.

Hope that helps.

yeah..no it doesn't lol
But thanks for the reply.

Actually I wont say where I am but needless to say there is a massive gap in the market where I am and it is something I am considering.

I'm just entertaining the thought at the moment, but I have no idea about the logistics behind it.
Such as: Scanning times, and then importing and using it in a model. How much work and time needs to be spent to get a scanned house interior for example into a revit model and converted for documentation purposes? This could be anywhere from 3 days scanning and a few hours of importation and stitching levels together, or the importation might take weeks, I just have no idea.

No one is really doing it here. Certainly not including the UAV surveys. I was looking at LiDAR capable drones, very cheap, and producing highly accurate surveys for external. I have seen a phantom drone scan the exterior of a building, and I have seen the same go-pro camera be used to scan the interior of the same house (it was 3 story). It was very good looking at the end of it, but I have no idea how long this took them. I might have to ask them, just wanting to get ideas from this community regarding that.

I mean you watch the publicity videos from Autodesk on this point cloud stuff and you get the impression its just a few clicks, I just have a feeling that the actual practical side of bringing in such data rich point clouds requires a really performant computer, and a whole bunch of time...just can't find much information on this.

Getting a USABLE model from a laser scan is not much of an automated process. Certainly, there are "tools" that will "automatically model things" based on Laser Scans... But in my experience in this realm (and ive had a bunch) you need someone doing their due diligence on every single item in the model, or the model ends up being a piece of trash. IMVHO the laser scan simply replaces the time of using hand tools and lasers to measure on site. But, if its being done correctly and well, the modeling portion takes just as long as before, or you end up with a lot of crap.

Thanks, yes this is kind of what I am worried about.

I didn't expect it to be as easy as just go, scan, and import but I can see situations where it would be extremely useful.
For example, the interior of some kind of existing processing plant. All that machinery, the space it occupies and the tubes coming out of it you would just not consider modeling from paper, plus all the temporary structure that surrounds it etc etc, here I can see a fantastic use for it because you don't even reall yneed much verification of the scan all that interests you is there is a big block in this space that takes up X space and I can try and fit something of the same dimension in there during refit. (Vague example, but I tried)

Ok if the modeling takes as long as off paper drawings that is interesting, and useful. It depends though, where I am there are some seriously old buildings and the plans are just so ancient (or don't exist on record anywhere) that doing refits can be a bit hit and miss - where if I can go on site and scan and use that then I might hit more often than I miss.

I have worked for a company that specializes in scanning, creating the point clouds, stitching the point clouds together, then modeling the elements. It is a extensive process, but having modelers make decisions gives the best results.

Here is their website: Architectural Resource Consultants (ARC)

Converted is not the right word here, it gives the impression that this is an automatic process.

Scanning or modeling, the same question exists : What do you mean by documentation? Are you a millworker or a rough carpenter? Detail = Time = Money

I work in structures.
The idea is scan an existing structure for refurb. This could range from existing house or low rise construction, to an industrial warehouse/processing plant.

From what I have seen, "converting" the model is not automatic but is fairly intelligent I can click on a point cloud object with my wall family and it will place to the same height/length/width as in the point cloud. However in some cases it might just be worth leaving the point cloud images in as a background and working with those as an aid rather than trying to make it form all of the model....again things I just don't know in this process.

Documentation may be along the lines of
Existing building plans
Demolition Plans
New construction plans & details
Reo Plans

THIS is the part that currently works like unintelligent crap. A point cloud is convinced walls are at 89.9999999999 degrees, and a lot of the software on the market will model it as such. Just like imported stuff from AutoCAD that revit interprets as Garbage, if you introduce that 89.999999999 degrees in to your project, you are never fixing it, and never getting it to go away.

Is it true that the wall is not at 90 degrees? Probably. But if you are planning on using that model for any type of renovation/documentation/project-work, you had better adjust to one of three realities:

1. You had better be a champion at dimensioning non parallel things, going strictly point to point in all cases
2. You had better accept the fact that *for documentation* you need it to be MODELED (not rounded) to 90 degrees
3. You had better accept the fact that you cant use automated tools for modeling from point clouds.

We tend to use laser scanning for bigger projects and odd spaces. Casinos have a lot of weird stuff going on, and sometimes we have to model it as existing per client demands. Laser scanning is way faster and more accurate than we will ever be able to survey it.

The latest project was a convention center where the only existing drawings were a bunch of bad bad tiff files. It took the laser scanning company a week to scan the whole space (meeting rooms, corridors, restrooms, pre-functions and ballrooms - 100,000+ SF) - they would send over finished area scans of the space so we could model it as they finished up the rest of the scans. It just saves us for a lot of field work, and when you get the relationship going with the scanning guys, they pretty much know what we are looking for in every project. As for the modelling - we model everything ourselves according to our standards - we haven't had the need (or guts) to outsource it.

The other thing that laser scanning gives us is full photo documentation of the space that you can access through Recap or similar programs. Every scan produces 360 degrees images, so we rarely need to go back on site and check things once the scan is complete.