The Discovery Programme was asked by the National Monuments Service of the OPW to undertake the 3D recording of selected architectural detail of two sites at Clonmacnoise, Co Offaly. The locations were Temple Finghin within the main Clonmacnoise complex and the Nun’s Church to the East, recently brought into state care.

The aim was to generate a suitably high resolution 3D dataset which would reflect the complexity of the architectural detail present in the stonework, whilst allowing the requested locations to be completed in the time available. When assessing the job we originally considered surveying with our NextEngine object triangulation laser scanner which has been used in the past to record extremely fine stone work and particularly carved stone art. However after a site inspection it was decided that the architectural detail present was not subtle enough to justify using it on this site.

The laser scanner used on the project was a Mensi GS101 time of flight scanner. The instrument was powered by a Kippor Sinemaster 1000 petrol generator and controlled by Trimble PointScape 3.2 hosted on a Panasonic Toughbook CF19. Processing was done using Trimble Realworks 6.5 with surface wraps generated in Geomagic 12 software.

Two georeferenced pointcloud dataset - one for Tempe Finghin and one for the Nun’s Church - segmented into the architectural elements, was the primary deliverable of the project. This was supplied to the clients, (National Monuments Service of the OPW) along with the instructions to download free viewer software (Trimble RealWorks Viewer) giving them the ability to view and manipulate the 3D pointcloud in the native RealWorks environment.

A range of GIS compatible outputs including orthoimages of the formal elevations were also generated to enable the data to be included in the more conventional environments such as Autocad. Our wrap surfaces were output from Geomagic 12 as 3D pdf's to enable the models to be more widely distributed.

A pdf version of the survey report for this project is available to download, see below.

 Clonmacnoise 2010 Laser Scanning Report (1.24 MB 2010-11-24 10:53:29)