alexschiff

Looking forward to having you on Dan's presentation! For anyone interested in learning more about the workflow for Canvas + Chief Architect, I highly recommend joining The Designers Show today: https://www.chiefexpertsacademy.com/designers-show-rsvp. To answer your question, Canvas isn't made for exteriors, though often you can get away with it. Specifically, the underlying sensing of Apple LiDAR (and any infrared light-based sensing system) can struggle in bright sunlight, so you'd want to use it on an overcast day, dusk when the sun is low, or under some kind of covering. Further, the range is 5m, which means that getting second stories and roofs are going to be a lot more challenging. So, it's doable in many circumstances, but more caveats and limitations, so we focus our positioning on interiors. You may also want to check out things like DroneDeploy for exteriors, since that's a much better way to capture things like roofs. If you can get good scans, from a Scan To CAD perspective, we can definitely process them, and we can align them to your interior scans based on common points, but getting some overlapping data is usually a good idea (e.g., scanning through the front door). This also means we can get more precise wall thickness, which otherwise has to be assumed via construction standards.

@CapozziDG great to see your name here - and that we've renewed your interest by supporting Chief Architect! Since I am sure many customers are wondering about accuracy, I thought I'd leave this here: https://support.canvas.io/article/5-what-kind-of-accuracy-can-i-expect-from-canvas If you're ever seeing measurements outside that 1-2% range, just let us know and we'd be happy to take a look at those orders. And of course, if you have any dimensions of your own you'd like us to match in a particular order, you can always do so: https://support.canvas.io/article/198-how-to-submit-manual-dimensions-to-canvas.

@JennCollins I just saw this thread while searching around for mentions on the forum about Canvas — I'm one of the product leaders for Canvas. Indeed, importing non-native Chief Architect files can definitely have some issues, and it sounds like you were trying to import the .dwg file from our SketchUp output. However, we actually just recently launched a native Chief Architect output for Scan To CAD. Instead of ordering the SketchUp output and trying to force it to work with Chief, you'll get a .plan file that should work without needing CAD-to-walls or similar. You can find more on this here in our recent post: Just PM me if you have any questions, and I'd be happy to help with any import issues. I'd also be happy to give you a code for a free scan on your next job since it sounds like you had issues the first time around!

Hi folks! Alex from the Canvas team here — a co-worker just alerted me to this thread after we just posted about Canvas in a different thread. I'm surprised I didn't see this before, but it was from less than 2 months after we launched the product for the very first time 3+ years ago . Chief wasn't even on my radar then — Scan To CAD supported SketchUp only for the first year or so, and have been steadily adding outputs since. Followers of this thread might be interested to know we just released a native Chief Architect output for our Scan To CAD service. A few people above rightly called out that initially, getting a working, editable file in Chief Architect was not a fun process. You either had to take the 3D mesh and manually measure and redraw, or try to process one of the other formats into something Chief can consume (like using CAD-To-Walls), which was a pain. We had some customers do this because it sped up measurement time, but it certainly wasn't as "turnkey" as simply having a native Chief output. Now, you scan, upload, and within ~2 days you get your .plan file (and of course, the 3D scan can be used to measure spaces instantly). My co-worker Ben posted about Canvas here: . And you can actually see some of our customers talk about using Canvas with Chief here: . If anyone has questions about the new roll-out, feel free to post here, post in one of the other threads, DM me or Ben, or shoot us an email at support@canvas.io.

@RobinDalyColor great to hear you're getting in there and can't wait to hear what you think! If you're only focused on windows, you might actually be fine just pulling quick measurements in the 3D Web Viewer. Not in my interest to tell you how you can avoid paying for Scan To CAD - but the ROI for Scan To CAD is usually best when you care about the whole room or home vs. a particular element. Plus, the 3D Web Viewer is more precise with a mouse on a computer vs. the iPad. Of course, that does require extra work (vs. the "easy button" that Scan To CAD provides for Chief), but I did want to highlight the option, as it's cheap (it comes with a Scan To CAD order, but you can get it standalone for $3 per scan, or $299 unlimited with Canvas Business). Just PM me if you have any questions about it. Here's an example of a scan from the new iPhone 12 Pro which you can try to measure: https://canvas.io/viewer/9WeH-j0O. It's a bit ahead of what you see on the iPad today in terms of visual quality (as it came out of a big R&D sprint we did recently), but it's what's coming to both apps (iPhone and iPad) soon.

Great to know that Canvas is being used up in Gold Country. I'm one of the product leaders for Canvas that was involved in rolling out Chief Architect support, and I've spent a ton of time around Murphys, Grass Valley, Big Trees, etc. Next time I'm up there I'll wonder which homes you used us on We'll be upgrading our sample data package with a lot more Chief Architect examples soon, so in the meantime if anyone wants to see more sample files, just shoot us an email at support@canvas.io. Chief Architect is a recent addition for us so I'll be monitoring this forum post extra closely for any feedback as well!