Coventry St Michaels Cathedral, built in the late 14th century. It was one of the most beautiful and largest parish churches of its time, in England until it was destroyed during the Second World War. 3D Scanners were required to produce a 360 degree record of the ruins. 3D scanning gives the opportunity to save, maintain and recover heritage objects. Laser scanners are non-contact measurement devices that capture millions of discrete points of real world objects or complex environments in only a few minutes. The resulting images are an assembly of millions of 3D measurement points, known as point clouds which can be aligned to create a polygon mesh. 3D Scanners used a Focus long range scanner to capture the St Michaels Cathedral, using this type of long range scanner is the most efficient way of capturing such a complex environment. The range of this type of scanner is from approximately 0.6m up to 130m and has a freedom of view of 360 degrees. The screen shots on the next page show the point clouds with the points coloured to the corresponding colours of the scans on the aerial photo...
The photo above shows the scan areas that were captured. Fifteen scans were taken in total, with the first being a full 360 degree scan covering the whole area. The engineers placed reference target datums (spheres and markers) all over the Cathedral. After all preparations were done, the long range scanner was placed in the middle of the ruins and a 360 degree high-quality reference 3D image was captured. This first 3D scan will contain most of the data and information about placement of the datums. These markers are used to align together multiple scans from their own coordinate system into one Primary aligned coordinate system. After completing the reference 3D scan we moved the long range scanner along the ruins in fourteen additional positions, which allowed us to align together each scan when processing the project. The goal of the additional scans is to collect as much data in this particular range with higher intensity of points per scan. Data Total number of points taken from scanning object = 250 million. Scanning time = 3.5 hours. Length of St Michaels Cathedral = 293 feet Back at the 3D Scanners Coventry office, PolyWorks 2014 software was used to process the points in IMAlign. The images on the next page are screenshots of the points captured scanning the area. We have coloured each group of scans to correspond to the photograph on this page to demonstrate the area captured by each scan...
The screen shots show the point clouds with the points coloured to the corresponding colours of the scans on the aerial photo.
The screen shots show the north & south ends of the cathedral ruins in point clouds. The points are coloured to the corresponding colours of the scans on the aerial photo (page 2). The brown coloured screenshot show texture information which has been added to the polygon mesh.this information is captured whilst scanning the cathedral.
The screen shots show the point cloud data and also the polygon mesh with IMTexture being used. The polygon mesh has not been cleaned up at this stage. If higher detail is required, a laser arm scanner would be used to capture more detail on specific areas. The existing data on the detailed areas captured with the long range scanner would then be used along side the laser arm scanner for alignment purposes. The polygon model is an accurate visual representation of St Michaels cathedral which will can be used for years. The screenshot above shows the window area after it has been cleaned up in PolyWorks software.