Mapping and GIS Solutions Community

Is there a way to place a model (SKP) such that you can use the EDM? If not, what about doing a manually placement on a vertical wall? A customer is holding out to see if they can use their GPR data in SiteVision but it's on a vertical concrete wall and want it accurately placed. I was hoping to use the EDM no different than recording an annotation point but picking the top right and lower left corners of the SKP and shooting the vertical wall where it's located. Thanks and please advise. 

There's currently no way to use the EDM when doing a Measured Placement when in the field. 

But they could use it in advance if that was practical. E.g. go to site, load any model. Take EDM measurements to establish known coordinates to use, and extract back in the office and use the positions to create the SiteVision model in Sketchup for an accurate Auto Placement on the 2nd visit. I've done this myself and it works OK - although it's a bit of a process.

If this isn't practical, doing a Manual Placement of a model with a vertical plane draped on a wall will work, but it might be a bit too difficult to get the horizontal scale and orientation accurate with this method. I assume this will be important - so I wouldn't recommend this option. This is more for 'indoor demo's'. 

Measured Placement is still worth looking into. I assume part of the issue for this customer is that they will get inaccurate GNSS positions as they approach the wall/building (hence you/they asked about using the EDM). 

Instead of using known points on the wall, would it be possible to have a couple points on the ground in the customers model either side of the "wall"?

I've done this for a Maze model I use. I can use the Measure Placement to put a Sketchup Maze model wherever I like, as I know the distance is 2m, and I can use whatever orientation works on that site:

Could they adapt their model along these lines? E.g. have 2 Ground points at a known distance & place in their model, and put out a length of tape in the same orientation as the "wall" then use the Measure placement method to give an accurate placement.

Some relevant caveats:

Note that neither the EDM or AR measurement mode is "survey grade". The EDM and AR modes are specified at

<20cm at 10m (Hprizontal RMS)

<10cm at 10m (Vertical RMS)

 So a Measure Placement with the EDM wouldn't be as accurate as what you can achieve with Ground points from the GNSS (with a VRSNow or RTK correction source). 

If you have an example of the data send in a Support case and we could look into it further if this doesn't help you enough.

Thanks for the info Brandon. This is a great start! The issue is the scale. They are scanning vertical concrete walls with GPR to look for conduit, misc utilities, and rebar. They were hoping to superimpose the resulting GPR image (in SKP) format onto the wall so they could visualize where the utilities are. They may only scan an area that is 2-3' x 2-3'. I would think they would want to take the information gathered from the GPR and create 3D linear vector linework and simply upload the feature class. Perhaps they have some optical instrumentation that they can use in conjunction with the GPR for this workflow? I think the best idea is your suggestion to take some GNSS shots on the ground for reference for the model. I haven't used sketch up so i don't know how you would "georeference" the GPR image. I guess you'd have to model the building as well? I am hoping to come up with a workflow, as it's a really interesting application and up to 8 students are working on this project as a work study.