Measuring and the shaft summary
You can measure any distance on the model, as many times as you like, without going back to the building.
Taking a measurement
- Make sure the Rotate button is off.
- Left-click the first point. The measurement line starts.
- Left-click the second point. The measurement finishes and the distance appears.
Useful keys
- A perfectly straight line
- Hold Shift while measuring, or turn on the Straight line button. The line locks to horizontal or vertical.
- Correcting an end
- Drag the end of an existing line to its new position.
- Deleting a measurement
- Click the line, then Delete.
- Undo
- Ctrl + Z, or the Undo button in the toolbar.
Naming a measurement — Labels
A measurement on its own is just a number. For it to count in the report, you have to say what you measured. In the panel on the right, next to each line, there is a role selector:
- Pit depth
- From the floor of the lowest landing down to the bottom of the shaft.
- Headroom
- From the highest landing up to the ceiling of the shaft.
- Travel
- From the lowest to the highest landing.
- Shaft width
- Clear width of the shaft.
- Shaft depth
- Clear depth of the shaft.
- Not a survey measurement
- A working measurement that does not go into the report.
The Shaft summary panel
On the right of the screen is the Shaft summary. It is the identity card of the shaft: everything you need for a preliminary design or to ask for a quote.
- Stops — counted from the storey levels found in the scan
- Pit depth, headroom, travel
- Clear shaft dimensions — width and depth, with the height at which the Narrowest point was found. That is what limits the car.
- Scan coverage — “… % scanned”: how much of the shaft was actually captured
Figures marked auto were worked out from the scan rather than from a line you drew. They are a first picture, and you can always replace them with your own measurement.
Warnings worth reading
- The scan does not reach the ceiling of the shaft…
- The scan did not reach the ceiling, so there is no headroom and the top level is being read wrongly as a stop. A new scan that covers the ceiling is needed.
- The scan does not go below the lowest landing…
- The scan did not go below the lowest landing, so there is no pit depth.
- The storeys are unevenly spaced — check these against the building
- Storey levels were found at uneven spacings. Verify the number of stops against the building before using it.
- Alignment is approximate — use Realign if it looks off
- The automatic alignment may need correcting.
- Heights with no scan data
- There are heights with no data. Values in those areas are not reliable.
The horizontal cross-section
The Cross-section panel cuts the shaft horizontally at any height you choose and shows its outline, with the outline at the pit shown underneath it as a shadow.
- Move the Height above the bottom slider to the height you want to check.
- Read the clear dimensions at that height (Clear at this height).
- Turn on Show the shaft only to hide everything that is not the shaft and see the outline clearly.
Departure from the pit shows how far the shaft drifts as it rises, as two figures: Twist, how far the section has rotated compared with the pit, and Shift, how far it has moved horizontally. Both matter for the guide rail brackets — a shaft that twists or shifts as it rises needs its supports thought about.