European Active Projects Ltd

About the company – EAPL

European Active Projects Ltd (EAPL) is a construction and fabrication company specialising in marine, offshore and land based projects including fabrication for the quarrying, renewables, and construction industries. With offices and facilities across the UK, EAPL also has its own CAD department working out of its Southampton office, creating designs and production drawings for all its projects using SolidWorks.

As part of its design work, the team at EAPL often has to measure sites ahead of creating designs – something that Ben Ayling, CAD Designer at EAPL, had to do by hand. Though this wasn’t a big problem when working on small-scale projects, working on larger sites made measuring by hand both impractical and difficult.

Though the team persevered and worked to a high standard, measuring large sites manually allowed small errors to creep in – which required extra site visits to rectify. Ben explains, “I remember one site in particular, which was about 2 acres and was essentially impossible to measure accurately by hand. Going back to re-measure areas where we’d found discrepancies slowed the project down – it was clear that measuring this way just wasn’t feasible on larger sites.”

To solve the challenge, Ben and EAPL looked into 3D scanning technology to gain accurate measurements of sites. They invested in FARO scanners, but then encountered another challenge – how to work with the point cloud files generated by the scanners, in SolidWorks. For their first project, EAPL’s partner Solid Solutions converted the point clouds into mesh models that Ben and the team could work with in SolidWorks.

“It was very helpful,” says Ben, “but we wanted to go one step further. We wanted to be able to work with point clouds natively in SolidWorks – the meshes we were using as a workaround often contained lots of irrelevant data that we couldn’t get rid of, and just weren’t as versatile as point clouds.”

“The scan had caught lots of data we didn’t need – including hundreds of birds in the harbour. With Veesus it was so easy to remove all that extraneous data, and just focus on what we needed.”

Ben Ayling
CAD Designer at EAPL

Luckily for Ben, Solid Solutions suggested a new way to solve the challenge – a SolidWorks plug in from point cloud experts Veesus. The plug-in enables CAD designers to work with point clouds of any size natively within SolidWorks, with no need for meshing or other workarounds.

“We’d looked at one or two other solutions, but none of them enabled us to work with point cloud data natively in SolidWorks – they all needed to convert point clouds into meshes first, so what Veesus was offering was really exciting,” Ben explains.

After meeting with Veesus and seeing the solution, Ben and the team decided to sign up to trial the beta version of the plug-in. From their very first trial, Ben was impressed. They uploaded a 2-mile wide scan of Ramsgate Harbour, in order to plan new buildings on the site, and were instantly able to navigate through the entire scan, including the dockside, ships in the harbour, and the buildings around it. The plug-in gives the user full manipulation of the point cloud, including the ability to clip portions out – which Ben found especially useful.

“The scan had caught lots of data we didn’t need – including hundreds of birds in the harbour. With Veesus it was so easy to remove all that extraneous data, and just focus on what we needed.”