GIS and 3D SW

Usually, or better said, always, big companies have more than one site that they need to have under control. These sites, of course, are not collocated around the same area and but still it’s useful if there is a way of visualizing all of them in one go using a map. Nowadays these maps, similar to the ones of Google earth or other companies like ESRI, are available to be used. The cool thing about these maps is that information can be added to them generating an intelligent map or GIS map. When this GIS maps are integrated with a 3D visualization SW we can get the full system dreamed by any operator. On one side they can check if there are any alarms on any the sites that need to be controlled in a very big area. On the other, when there is an alarm it’s very easy and intuitive to navigate into the model to check the exact equipment that is producing the alarm.
As said when these systems are integrated together, operators will resolve one of the big challenges that have nowadays; capability to review all the sites that are many km away from each other and the capability to immerse into one specific site to inspect a detected alarm, and all this on just one click, or even less.

Laser Scan and 3D modeling

As the 3D is getting more important in some of the big Oil&Gas compnies, the need to get realistic 3D models is becoming a pain to most of the managers. The main problem comes when the plant to virtually visualize is very old, may be from the 60s or 70s of last century, when of course there was no 3D modeling at all like there is nowadays, in most of the companies. To face this problem some companies offer scanning services that can do very interesting work. Of course, scanning the whole plant and viewing it as a pointcloud, is not enough for most of these big companies as the final idea is far more ambitious than just visualizing it. As I have commented in previous posts, the final idea is always integration with other SWs and DBs. In order to do this, these scanning companies are also evolving to include in their services what is being called “modeler”, to allow the end user to obtain the 3D data as polygons instead of 3D points. These modeling tools are just semiautomatic and require quite some time to model a whole plant, although they are becoming a real need to get valid 3D data that can be really integrated.

I leave a nice post about laser scanning of one of my colleagues:

http://engineervr.blogspot.com/2009/06/laser-scan-side-note.html