To scan the building in order to create the 3D model, most often PACE will use a Matterport camera first while doing the initial walk-through. Because the camera will create a model that captures cracks and provides accurate measurements, all parties don’t necessarily need to be present at walk-through. This saves time for subcontractors and consultants, and money for the owners, who won’t be billed for that time. Plus, Babin says, capturing all that data about a project before PACE begins their work has an added benefit: risk mitigation. If there’s a dispute over, say, a crack in the masonry wall or the slope of a foundation, PACE can simply review the footage from the Matterport and prove the presence, or absence, of the defect in question. The 3D model provides a level of transparency that just wasn’t available a few years ago. To really grasp how huge a leap this is, consider the rental car process: traditionally, when renting a car you walk around the vehicle with an employee of the rental agency, making note of dents and scratches. The process takes about two minutes and is far from thorough. But now imagine you had a 3D model of the car you could refer to when you get stuck with a bill for a $500 scratch.

So where does that 3D model go to live? How is it most usefully deployed? At PACE, the model is tied into Bluebeam Revu. As Babin explains, in Matterport using MatterTags “We can actually walk up to the crack, put a purple dot there, which is PACE’s color, and then put a note about masonry repair.” Then they’ll go into Revu, “we’ll find it on the plan, we’ll make a cloud there and then we will put the same notes” and link that to that tag. This way a GC or subcontractor can actually see the problem in virtual reality and on a site plan. This allows for a better understanding of the needs of the project before they even get on site. To communicate with all the different parties, PACE creates a Studio Session, where people can see each other’s comments and a record is created of who said and did what, when. Bluebeam is “the hive,” as Babin calls it, of all the 3D modelling and laser scanning activity, because it’s the collaboration space that brings everybody, and all the data, together.