Showcase examples and case studies

3D models and illustrations are always attractive to people, no matter whether they work in the industry or not. Almost everyone acknowledges the importance of showcasing their successful examples to their audiences. For those who provide 3D scanners and software, it is essential to address the strengths of their products through the final result. Your example also helps you to make your company’s brand more identifiable and outlines the difference with others. With specific examples, you can put your clients in the shoes you customized for them. It can be a video recording of the 3D models, preparation or working diary, or even test examples you just tried out during your free time. These examples help to create an adequate connection between your scanners/hardware/software with the final result, so clients will get a clear understanding of what they will be expected when they purchase your products. 

Case studies are also significantly important, as it showcases the entire workflow as well as your company’s philosophy throughout the whole story. Suppose you even get authorization from your previous clients or partners. In that case, you can include their names in the story line as a character, and explain to your audiences why your involvement makes a significant difference that others cannot. 

Advice N0.2

Not just photos, but also videos and 3D visualization platforms

No matter if you are a service or product provider, you are aware that you are working in the 3D tech industries, right? There is no doubt that you will be the first one who takes advantage of 3D visualization, in all aspects. If your clients can benefit from using your technology, you can do as well. Photos are great if you would like to showcase all these details or the overall structure of the 3D models, but that is far more than enough. 

You shall consider using specific platforms to record your 3D point clouds, or even share it, such as VAM2. From my previous experience, both the LinkedIn audiences and our clients love to watch their 3D models as they are playing a game. With some web-browser based platforms (like VAM2), you can simply use your mouse and keyboard to move around and view 3D models regardless of file size or the device. Audiences always want more than just a photo, with an active 3D model online, the entire product story line will be completed. 

Advice No.3

Connect your products with the final result

“What does it mean to me if I make a purchase?”

Customers usually tend to balance between their expected result and the amount of money they invested. When it comes to professional 3D scanners, the market does favor not only those that are popular but also those with numbers and significant results. There are many different ways for you to connect your product/service with the final result, and it depends on the target audiences you are focusing on. For scanner providers, the target audience is very diverse, and obviously, they have different needs and requirements. Everyone loves an easy-to-use product with good results, so address that!

Advice No.4

Address visualization possibilities with your 3D models

There are so many things that a 3D model can achieve, no matter if it is a high precision point cloud or a quick, cheap mesh. Clients in the different levels of the market might also use the 3D model differently. An engineer might look for a high precision 3D RGB point cloud that can visualize a 0.03mm crack in a tunnel, yet an art collector will need a 6MB 3D point cloud that can quickly be loaded to showcase its gallery and collections. 

Even though our clients are usually the one who use the 3D models, it is also interesting to know that not everyone knows how to use their 3D assets wisely. A 3D marketer needs to showcase the enormous possibilities of these 3D assets, such as improving shopping experience; speed up workflow; visualize assets; enrich entertainment. This will become clearer if you see this task as gold-digging ——- finding the shiny part within the sand. After all, everyone will be impressed by the power of storytelling.

Advice No. 5

Webinar and live-streaming will make your brand alive.

Online events such as webinar and live-streaming became even more important in the pandemic. Up to now, there is still nothing that can replace the feeling of seeing a person’s face. Webinars do not only enable you to do a talk online but also enables you to showcase a specific topic in any form you like to a group of potential users. It involves some interaction as well, one can comment or share, and another one can ask and answer questions. Things became alive, and more importantly, these chat moments can be prolonged with the shares, likes and comments on the Internet. 

Advice No.6

Listen to feedback, not just the number of likes.

In social media marketing, some figures are easy to draw you or your boss’s attention away, such as the number of likes, shares, comments or followers. There is no doubt that you can never do real social marketing if you don’t keep these figures growing, but never forget the purpose of why you are doing social marketing here —– to enable your company and your clients to get to know each other, and make the brand alive. Surprise or not, social marketing channels are excellent places for you to reach out to a group of special audiences that might not come across to your business in daily activities, yet one of them might be your future clients as well. Through sharing useful news, case studies, updates, or examples, each post you created provides a related topic for your online community to discuss with. Thus, you can see some useful feedback as time goes by. These feedbacks might not be as obvious as you thought, but you will end up realizing what are some points that you did not explain or highlight, which further draw confusions to readers. Or else, which functionality really hit the pain spot of your clients. 

Advice No.7

Seek for collaboration and partnerships with other 3D Tech providers

Same as any other tech sectors, 3D-tech industries are a combination of different providers and users. Over the entire tech journey of your clients, it is often that it involves using several hardware and software to produce the desired outcomes. Finding your companions to target the right group of audiences will benefit both parties, you and the other provider as well. Considering both of you are building upon each other’s brands, it became easier for you to sell your product to a mature group of users. In return, you can also promote your partner’s product and services to those long-term users to speed up their workflow. 

Advice No.8

Think creatively, how can you help?

Providing a 3D solution is never just giving out a quality 3D model but much more than that. Nowadays, 3D assets are easier to access; some even treat it the same as other traditional digital assets, such as photo, video, audio or documentation. Understanding what role your 3D assets play in your client’s workflow can make a significant difference. To show your compassion and professional knowledge in this, you can use these 3D assets as part of the story. For instance, engineers who are working in the oil rig platform are looking for a fast, easy-to-use but also safe scanner. Therefore I will recommend using the Civetta. But what makes this scanner special? Well, we can instantly upload all the panorama images to the VAM2, so then people in the onshore center can also visualize the result on the same day! That is the main point that makes both onshore and offshore engineers favor Weiss AG’s 3D solution. In other words, try to integrate your 3D solutions to your client’s workflow in a reasonable but also personalized way.

Advice No.9

Details, details, details

In many cases, it is the details that are able to make several different functions to link together and finally be useful at work. It is excellent if you are a person that really cares about the details of your products but also bear in mind that your clients will be even more confused if you spend hours to explain the design and purpose of each component. Other than that, showing to them how these details can end up making them the critical change makers to achieve clients’ requirements. Treat these detail designs as a dessert, not the main. 

Advice No.10

Work with a team, don’t fight alone.

Almost everyone knows the importance of team work when promoting your company’s brand to the market. It does involve not only posting or design, but also a deep understanding of your client’s behaviors, workflow, as well as a bit of technological theory and practices (if you meant to work in the 3D industry). If you are starting marketing like me, as an individual without a computer science background, feel free to keep your questions in mind and try to understand your hardware/software from your clients’ perspective, as well as understand the reason why things function in such way. There is always a reason when it comes to tech. 

Conclusion

I wish these 10 pieces of advice I provided are useful for you and your team. Surprise or not, many 3D technology companies do not even do any marketing in the space. As you know, marketing is never easy. However, with the development of technology, you can do a lot more than you once can, not just reaching the guy on the other side of the table. Feel free to send me a message or email me if you would like to share your piece of advice about marketing in the 3D Tech space. 

Author: Christiane Zhao

Tunnel Monitoring and Measurement

With the increasing number of tunnels built around the world, the monitoring, detection, maintenance and renovation of these tunnels are increasingly important. Tunnel projects are typically huge investments. They often have a long route mileage and involve strong concealment, factors which impose heightened quality requirements on the construction and maintenance during operation. Highly accurate 3D scanning is quickly becoming the main way to document and visualize the in-progress build condition of urban tunnel projects.

Weiss AG, a European company of experts with more than 10 years experiences in 3D scanning, provides 3D scanning and digital asset management (DAM) services to support construction groups working in tunnel design and maintenance. The use of Civetta, a 360-degree camera by Weiss AG, can generate a set of panoramic HDR images to produce a 3D model. These 3D scanners allow the user to take measurements while extracting 3D coordinates and geo-reference information in relation to each panoramic picture. With the Visual Asset Management System provided by Weiss AG, the construction and management teams can establish visual connections between multimedia files, thus enabling better communication and documentation throughout the project.

Background

Weiss AG’s reseller, Guangzhou MG Data Tech Ltd, helped the Beijing Metro Group to provide on-site terrestrial scanning services for site surveys and inspections. The initial challenge of the Beijing Metro Project was to detect issues within the water percolation of the metro tunnel in central Beijing. The main goal of this scanning project was to provide accurate as-built documentation to help engineers and architects determine precise measurements on or off-site, make structural assessments and ensure the highest standards of safety.

3D Scanner and Scanning Services

3D scanning provides a more accurate and simpler way to understand and explain the status and progress of tunnel projects. For documenting as-built conditions, the density of point clouds, meaning the density of points of reference within the environment for the program to utilize, must be high enough to produce CAD drawings, 3D mesh models and panoramic point cloud pictures. A high solution scanner is needed in underground construction such as tunnel projects. As the Beijing metro tunnel needs to detect water percolation, the scanner must have an accuracy within 0.03 mm to identify crevices in the tunnel.

Civetta is preferable to use as it provides time-efficient and accurate equipment allowing the capture of high-quality images with the press of a single button. The Civetta is a fully automated 360-degree camera that can create 32-bit HDR images. Civetta takes a mere 40 seconds to record an entire spherical image, capturing all the varying light within the scene. With an impressive accuracy of +- 2mm within a 10m distance, users can take precise measurements from the captured images via the Visual Asset Management (VAM2) platform. 

Terrestrial scanning saves hundreds of hours on planning time and prevents misspent labor. This detailed and accurate information can help the company save time and money, avoid mistakes and increase transparency between different departments in maintaining, repairing and upgrading the facility.

Processing Image-Based 3D Scan Point Clouds

After performing a 360-degree panoramic scan, the raw point cloud must be processed. CivettaProcessing was selected as the software for processing the point-cloud data, as it is a compilation software that pairs up with the Civetta camera provided by Weiss AG. It avoids compatibility problems between the software and equipment and avoid the cost of purchasing software since it is part of the package when purchasing Civetta.

CivettaProcessing supports the automatic alignment of overlapping areas of point clouds to .esr and .jpg files, as well as the use of targets to geo-reference scan data. More than five hundred scans were registered together to generate one complete model space to establish a 3D mesh model, This space was based on hundreds of sets of panoramic point cloud pictures. The HDR images taken by the Civetta includes real 3D coordinates and accurate measurement distances, so it is achievable for engineers to extract this information to use in any other system. Users can also generate the measurement details through a few clicks or connect digital files with URLs in VAM2.

The Use of Visual Asset Management Platforms to View, Edit, Manage and Share Project Assets

Good as-built documentation has the potential to be very valuable to the owners and operators of infrastructure facilities and to all stakeholders in large infrastructure projects. The as-built documentation is obtained soon after project completion, or is updated during construction, and when the documentation includes a high standard of accuracy, it has a greater number of uses in the operations phase of large facilities.

With the VAM2 innovated by the Weiss AG team, it enables client groups to generate and manage digital assets throughout the tunnel construction process through tools such as point cloud collection, section deformation analysis, dislocation analysis, tunnel and track image generation, roaming video generation and other essential tunnel-related documentation.

VAM2 is completed based on cloud technology, and all data types can be accessed via a single web browser. It includes, but is not limited to 3D models, documents, CAD data, panoramic pictures, 360 videos, audio, geo-reference, maps and much more. By establishing the links between the 3D model and other files via URLs, viewers can establish a more comprehensive and realistic understanding of the construction environment, together with the amount and quality of contributions by each team or individual member.

For some construction data that is sensitive and should not be available to the public, the team can either set authorisation restrictions on the cloud, or directly request a private package to be sent. Invitation codes or passwords can be created to secure the information on the cloud. The final product was a simple URL that could be opened and shared with other authorized project participants anywhere and at any time.

Generally, it is difficult for people without engineering background to understand the information involved in surveying reports, drawings, and engineering data. For the interest of transparency, public agencies that commission construction projects must make project information available to the government officials and to the general public. It is important to know that VAM2 does not have minimum computer system requirements, nor does it require users to have any technical skills or knowledge. VAM2 can be integrated into the traditional workflow for legal entities, and can also accelerate clear work distribution between departments or groups. Therefore, VAM2 has been used by several government agencies and legal entities across the world for the purposes of documentation and management.

Author: Christiane Zhao