When Patrick walks into an office site today, he is looking for more than a list of dimensions. He wants a record of the space that designers and project teams can return to after the site visit is over. 

Modelling has long been part of his work. During Brisbane’s Riparian Plaza project, Patrick helped create a scale model of the building to examine how it would sit within the surrounding urban environment. Later, he used 3D printers to produce interior design models. 

Now, at Cachet Group⁠, where he works on office design and construction projects, that modelling process can begin with the existing site itself. 

Hear Patrick tell the story of how 3D scanning has changed the way Cachet Group approaches site capture.

When notes and photos have to carry the whole site 

Before 3D scanning became part of Cachet Group’s workflow, site measures followed a familiar routine: photographs, handwritten notes, rough plans, and dimensions taken one at a time. 

 “Before this, we generally did it the old-fashioned way, which was relying on laser, laser pointers and site measures and notebooks.” 

For a straightforward space, those tools can capture what the team needs. The challenge grows when a site is complicated and the information has to support design work after everyone has left. Missing a useful measurement or detail can mean another visit. 

“So what generally happens is we have to go out and take lots of photos and then do up like a rough sort of hand-drawn plan with dimensions that we get from a laser pointer.” 

Capturing large spaces in minutes 

Cachet Group has been using the FJD Trion P2 LiDAR Scanner to create a 3D record of the site while Patrick moves through it. In simple terms, the scanner records the shape of the surrounding space so the team can review it later as a digital model. 

“Now, if the job’s complicated, that could take weeks.With the FJD Trion P2, we’re able to get in and record quite big spaces in literally sort of twenty minutes.” 

For Patrick, the value is not only the time spent on site. The scan can preserve details that might otherwise be missed during a conventional measure, giving the team more information to return to once design work is underway. 

Giving distributed teams the same view of the site 

Cachet Group works across multiple locations, which means the people designing or coordinating a project may not all experience the site in person.

“Cachet has offices across a variety of geographies, so we work in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, and the Philippines. So having a LiDAR scan or a 3D scan enables us to get a good idea about what the sites that we’re dealing with entail, and it’s a good way to communicate that across a wide variety of spaces.” 

Instead of asking colleagues to interpret disconnected photographs, notes, and measurements, the team can use the scan as a shared reference. Patrick says that also helps reduce the need to return simply because something useful was not captured the first time. For someone whose career has moved from physical scale models to 3D-printed models and now frequent digital site capture, it is another change in how modelling supports everyday design work. 

From capturing the site to putting it to work 

Patrick’s experience is ultimately about having more of the site available after the site visit has ended. 

“The scanner has been incredibly helpful. It’s one of those things that we’ve been looking at that for a while, a way to do site measures efficiently and to make sure that we capture all of the information. It’s been an absolute game changer for our business.” 

Once a space has been captured, the next question is how that information moves into the drawings and documentation used during design. 

Explore FJD Trion’s Scan-to-CAD workflow⁠ to see how captured 3D site data can move toward CAD drawings for the next stage of a project.