Beam Camber with BuildIT Construction
Objective:
Using BuildIT Construction to measure camber of a beam.
You’ll learn:
- A simple workflow for analyzing the camber of a beam.
- Opening BuildIT, opening a BuildIT file and manipulating the viewport.
- Associating surfaces from the model to the point cloud.
- Performing surface analysis of the scan data verses the CAD data.
- Creating annotations of the analysis.
- Creating a report from the annotations and analysis.
Tutorial Download
If you would like to download the file used in this article, download the accompanying Training Data and extract its contents to a folder on your PC.
Navigate to the Area of Interest
Open the “Module 11.buildit” file by selecting “File> Open” and navigating to where the file is saved.
- Navigate to the area of interest, shown below.
Associate Scan Data to CAD Surfaces
- Now the scan data should be associated to CAD surfaces. This allows the software to only perform analysis with scan points that are near CAD surfaces, speeding up the process.
- Select “Refine > Auto Associate”.
- Select Cloud1 for “Clouds”.
- For Geometries, select the box and then the whole beam. Group picking can be enabled to select the whole beam at once.
- Enter “BEAM” for the “Cloud name suffix”.
- Ensure “Exclude points farther than” is checked with a value of 6 inches. This option will only search out up to 6 inches for points to associate. If the cloud is farther than 6 inches, it will be ignored.
- Select “Apply”.
Perform Surface Analysis
- Now that the points have associated to our CAD, we can perform surface analysis.
- Select “Evaluate > Surface Deviation Analysis”.
- For “Surfaces”, select in the area to start the selection. Select the bottom surface of the beam.
- Set the “Maximum Search Distance” to 6 inches, mirroring the distance set in the Associate command.
- Select Preview to review the analysis.
- For “Color scale”, set it to Rainbow – Red-Green-Red. This will make points that are out of tolerance yellow to red and points that are within tolerance green.
- For “Analysis mode”, select “Colored surfaces + Needles”.
- For the “Limits”, change to “User-defined”. The tolerance used for this exercise will be 2 inches. Enter 2 for “Upper tolerance” and -2 for “Lower tolerance”.
- Set the “Needle scale” to 10. This will exaggerate the size of the deviation for analysis.
- Select “Apply”.
Create Annotations
- Now, annotations are needed to represent the deviation we see between the scans and CAD.
- Select “Evaluate > Surface Inspection Analysis”.
- Select scan points to annotate, then select “Apply” to create the annotation, or Middle Mouse Click.
- Once several annotations have been created, use Set View to save a view with the annotations. Name it Deviation Analysis.
Create a Report from the Annotations and Analysis
- Include the items created on a report.
- Select items to include in the report.
- Include the two views created, the analysis, and the annotations.
- Right click and select “Add to Report”.
- If the items are not in the intended order, they can be moved up or down by selecting and dragging the item.
- Select Run to create the report.
- Select items to include in the report.
Recap:
Congratulations, you have completed the module on beam camber! By now you should have a grasp of how to:
- A simple workflow for analyzing the camber of a beam.
- Opening BuildIT, opening a BuildIT file and manipulating the viewport.
- Associating surfaces from the model to the point cloud.
- Performing surface analysis of the scan data verses the CAD data.
- Creating annotations of the analysis.
- Creating a report from the annotations and analysis.