Small Firm Exchange

I am curious to know if firms have found value in investing in a Matterport camera compared to outsourcing as-built services. If you handle the Matterport camera scanning in-house, do you also have Matterport prepare a BIM model? If so, what has been your experience with the quality of the model?

My preference is to have the matterport to scan existing conditions, and then have the existing BIM model set up in-house. Personally I like for the BIM model to be started from the firm templates, using the firm's families, wall types, parameters, etc. I find there is still some bridging work to be done when outsourcing that existing conditions modeling. I do think it could possibly be more viable with scale - I.e. a very large existing building may be worth outsourcing to save the time for a small firm with limited resources. But I prefer to retain control of the modeling generally.

In line with what most of the previous comments have stated, our firm primarily uses Matterport scans as a replacement for taking photos with a phone or tablet. Occasionally, we'll rely on it to capture a measurement that was missed during a site visit, or when a condition comes up later and we need a specific dimension.

Most of our scanning is done in-house. If the space is particularly large, we may outsource the scanning, as we typically only have one Matterport camera per office and prefer not to tie up staff for more than a day of scanning and travel. This has only happened a few times, since most of our projects can be scanned within a day.

We do not use Matterport's 3D file exports, as we have our own firm standards, families, and templates for BIM modeling. I have heard in the past that the file exports tend to bog down Revit and frequently cause crashes. 

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Samantha Johnson AIA
Plunkett Raysich Architects
Sarasota FL
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