ChronoPoints Entry on Piney Croft

This blog post is a mix of previous information I presented earlier in my blog. The following blog is what I delivered to be a part of the ChronoPoints website as the Piney Croft Entry.

 Architect and Design

Clifford William Wright is the architect who built the A-framed home at Piney Croft, Maitland. Wright was born in the hamlet of Oceanside in Nassau County, Long Island, New York on April 15, 1933, yet spent most of his childhood in the Winter Park/Maitland area. He received his Bachelor of Architecture in 1955, received his architect's license, then moved across the street from the Meyer family. After getting to know the Meyer family and being inspired by Mrs. Meyer's artistic ideas, he designed a house for them to be completed by the end of 1959.

Orlando Sentinel, 4 October 1959, Sunday, page 155.

        Wright spent two months coming up with the design for the Meyer residence and was pushed by Mrs. Meyer's artistic demands to create the unique A-framed structure. Wright designed the house to be easily cooled despite the 32-foot overhead since the cooler air would collect towards the bottom of the house, however, this property would also make it difficult to heat the house in the winter. Wright overcame this drawback by designing a brick fireplace to help with Florida's short winters. In designing the Meyer family's residence, he was challenged to anchor the tall 32-foot A-framed structured against hurricanes and other strong winds. The answer to ensuring the structure's integrity came from using steel plates to clamp the support beams in the center structure and anchor them into large pieces of concrete buried underneath the ground.

Undated Photo

             The house was of a modern design in 1959 by following the recent trend of A-framed houses started in 1957 by Andrew Geller and was the first A-framed home in the Central Florida area. It was designed with many modern influences including a sunken living room, wall to wall carpet, aluminum construction and newly prefabricated wooden beams, and thirty-two double multicolored glass windows along the two major A-framed walls however, it is not clear if these multicolored glass windows ever made it into the final build over a more traditional choice. Wright balanced the unique structure with two traditional expansions on both sides of the A-frame featuring additional bedrooms and bathrooms on the eastern side and a three-car garage on the western totaling 2600 square feet. Plans for a seamless patio deck and pool extending south of the eastern wing of the house was drawn but, much like the multicolored window panels, there are doubts if there were ever followed through.

Renovations

            The structure underwent renovations circa 1999 at the behest of a previous owner. An additional wing was added to the south side of the residence to the east of the A-frame where the pool would have been built. Interior renovations also took place which involved homogenizing the tile work throughout the house and adding stonework encasing around the original brick fireplace to match the new stonework fireplace in the new wing bringing the total square footage up to 3200.

 

Orange County Property Appraiser Website, https://ocpaweb.ocpafl.org/dashboard.

Processing the Data - Terrestrial Laser Scanning at Piney Croft

 After we captured the data in the field, I returned to the lab a few days later to get hands-on experience in working with the post-processing component of the Lecia RT 360. Both photogrammetry and laser scanning take a considerable amount of processing power and wait time, yet due to the amount of data available from laser scanning, it takes exponentially more. Once the scans were loaded in, a digital site map is available to manipulate with a series of dots representing each scan that we monitored on the iPad in the field complete with each link we made on the ground.

               Each point on the map comes with a spattering of data creating a partial point cloud of everything the scanner was able to see from its location.  Each link that connects two points is essentially pulling each partial point cloud together in one frame, once every point is linked the point cloud should resemble an accurate depiction of what we scanned. The links also serve as the main way to align each partial point cloud, a similar process when dealing with photogrammetry. Once a link is made between two scans, the main workflow involves inspecting each of the two scans to ensure they are aligned properly and if not, then fixing them.

Figure 1

This alignment process is depicted in figure 2 with a top-down view of the site that has an orange depiction, which is one of the partial points clouds, and the teal depiction, which is the currently selected partial point cloud, which is a part of this link. This particular set of scans had a hard time aligning in the field which results in a clustered and confusing point cloud if left alone. The goal is to pivot the teal scan to match the orange so it sits directly on top of the original. Once the top-down view is aligned, we have to switch the viewpoint to be lateral to the site to best align the floor and ceilings from the orange and teal scans to one another. Upon verifying that both the lateral and topdown views are aligned we clicked “join and optimize” in the lower right-hand corner for the link to be created and for the program to see if it can find more potential links on its own.  The rest of the post-processing mainly involves finding scans that could make good links, verifying the alignment on each one, and letting the program attempt to find links on its own. The result looks like what is depicted on the right screen in figure one, a clean and concise scan.

               This leaves us with an accurate point cloud ready to be showcased on the Chronopoints website, yet this data can be further developed for other ends. Everything around the structure including the front and back yards can be cut from the point cloud to reduce the need for unwanted data. Then the remaining structure could be meshed in another program to create a 3D object that could then be 3D printed similar to my previous internship. Texture can also then be applied to that mesh to get a very accurate and eye-catching model that can serve as a great addition to a video game engine like Unreal or for a detailed form of digital storytelling. 

               

Figure 2

Scanning Piney Croft

                 As mentioned previously, this project was delayed into the summer semester due to COVID-19. The face-to-face portion of this internship hinged on meeting together with Dr. Walters, Dr. Michlowitz, and Dr. French at Piney Croft to scan the building using the Lecia RT360 terrestrial laser scanner. Working around some weather delays we were all able to convene on Monday, July 28^th to scan the residence early in the morning to avoid the Florida heat.

                My site map that I constructed at the end of the spring semester was not used to direct the location of the scanner, for that we used Dr. Walter’s on the ground direction to ensure the best scan. Instead, what my site map allowed me to do was to compare the scans we took and problems we encountered to what I surveyed a few months prior.  Overall, we took roughly 30 scans of the building’s exterior which is very similar to the number of scans on my site map and the probable difficulties I encountered turned out to be the exact difficulties we encountered later on.

                Vegetation was the largest concern since a few trees and bushes grew close to the residence at the front of the house as well as near the rear of the A-frame structure and other than scanning behind the bushes, there is not much that could be done to scan the obscured portions. One concern I did not foresee came from scanning the house at a distance, since this is a residential area, we could not traipse through neighbors’ yards for the sake of unobscured data that could only be viewed from far away. While these two difficulties presented concerns for the final product, not much could be done, however, this illuminated the limitations present in the field that the articles I read previously in the spring semester echoed. Barring expensive scaffolding and roof access to other buildings, these limitations just have to be accepted and this project gave me a greater appreciation and understanding with these present limitations of terrestrial laser scanning.

                The scanning process itself was not too difficult, the scanner is easy to move around and is connected to an iPad that is running an app that allows us to start the scanner remotely and monitor each scan and link them to one another all while in the field. We enabled the Lecia RT360 to take photos in addition to each scan in order to get color mapped onto the point cloud, while it raises the overall scan time to about 1 minute and 15 seconds, it is still much faster than the older Faro terrestrial laser scanner which takes approximately 15 minutes for scans.

                I was surprised on how easy the process was, trying to replicate the work done with photogrammetry definitely would have been very time-consuming and nowhere near as accurate. The drawback to the laser scanner is its obscenely high cost. The Lecia RT360 costs approximately $80,000 with a proprietary $750 USB stick, when contrasted with low-cost photogrammetry the difference is astounding. This difference will be evaluated later in the internship by comparing the laser-scanned point cloud to that of a photogrammetric point cloud.