Scanning permission
A render of the campus
With both a reverse engineering and architecture feature in this issue it was hard to pigeonhole this story into one of the sections. As a team at 3M Buckley Innovation Centre (3M BIC) in Huddersfield has set about a huge reverse engineering task to capture the entire University of Huddersfield Campus.
Over £100m has been invested into the University’s main Queensgate Campus and its growth has been extraordinary. Documenting it has been no mean feat but Paul Tallon, Consultant Designer at 3M BIC and Visualisation Assistant, Luke Phillips were happy to put 3M BIC's scanning, modelling and printing resources to the test.
“The aim is to get a complete virtual campus to help Open University and international students navigate around the campus,” explains Luke. “We have been gathering data, plans and pictures, on each building in the campus and recreating them in 3D.”
Scanning permission
3D Prints of Firth Street including the impressive creative arts campus at the back
The buildings were entirely modelled from 2D elevations and existing building plans, anything requiring greater detail the team photographed and modelled it. The buildings were modelled in 3DS Max then scaled to an existing plan view map of the town for the perfect scale.
The CAD data that the 3M BIC team has created will appear both virtually on the University's website as a visual aid and physically as a 3D printed model for the foyer. The team have created 3D printable models of each building on the campus and printing them on the in-house EOS Formiga P110.
The team did not stop at exteriors; some buildings, like that of the Business School, have their interiors mapped out both virtually and, when printed, physically. “We've worked on it for six months,” says Luke. “It takes roughly 2 to 3 days of modelling per building, once modelled the buildings can be converted to an FBX file format and put into Unreal Engine, a game engine. In here you can walk around the buildings and also use an Oculus or any VR headset to navigate around campus.”
Scanning permission
Business school render and 3D print
An addition to the virtual tour will be an avatar of the University’s Vice-Chancellor, Bob Cryan. “We scanned the vice-chancellor using an Artec Spider Scanner,” says Luke. “We scanned his head and shoulders and then reconstructed him in Z Brush and rigged up a character that can walk round the virtual campus. The vision is to have the vice-chancellor pop up and speak to you in any language to give potential students a better understanding of the university.”
The digitisation of the campus will also serve as an interesting study in town planning, as the team look to capture the entire university first, their work has also extended to some major landmarks in the city centre such as the train station. And are even looking in discussion with a company to scan the campus using drone mounted photogrammetric scanning of the topography and buildings to give us the height map of the campus so that the builds can be placed at the correct height.
In the RIBA white paper on Digital Planning former Chair of the RIBA Planning Group and chartered architect, Peter Stewart says that current town planning is stuck in a "Digital Stone Age", so how could scanning a whole city differ from, say using Google Maps Street View? This comment from Peter's white paper gives us a clue:
“The kind of digital imagery we are used to seeing on Time Team, with successive phases of building on an archaeological site reconstructed in ‘fast forward’ fly-throughs, could be used for future project proposals and made available for consultees to review on a local authority website. Or a dynamic imaging app could allow you to hold up your iPad in front of you on site and view a new scheme overlaid on reality, as it would appear from that viewpoint. Increasingly detailed digital city models already exist, and with more detailed data, greater computing power and better applications, the possibilities for inserting schemes in a digital world are exciting.”
