TL;DR: Ann Arbor is about three hours by road from our Powell, Ohio headquarters — single-day mobilization, no flights or freight. ±5mm laser scanning and scan-to-BIM for campus, research, healthcare, and downtown projects.
Ann Arbor is a three-hour drive north via US-23 — single-day mobilization from our Ohio base, with the same no-flight, no-freight economics as our home region.
The market is institutional at its core: one of the nation's largest university campuses in perpetual renovation, a major academic medical center, a research-and-startup economy fitting out lab space, and a downtown of protected-character commercial blocks. Institutional buildings mean occupied buildings — and occupied capture is the workflow we've built our practice on.
Campus work sets the pattern: phased multi-building capture registered to one coordinate system, scheduled into academic breaks, feeding planning, renovation design, and space management. Lab and research fit-outs add the dense-MEP dimension where above-ceiling documentation prevents retrofit clashes.
The medical center and downtown carry the rest — occupied healthcare capture with off-hours windows, and renovation baselines for a commercial core where character preservation makes accurate existing conditions a review-board necessity, not a nicety.
Published case studies closest to the work Ann Arbor projects ask for.
Scan-to-BIM is a two-stage process: capture, then modeling. Field capture produces the registered point cloud; our modelers then build a native Revit model directly against that cloud — walls, structure, and MEP as real Revit families with accurate geometry, at the Level of Development your scope specifies. At LOD 300, model faces hold ±10mm to the registered cloud, and the accuracy report documents it.
Timeline-wise, a typical 100,000 square foot building runs 10–15 business days to LOD 200 and 3–5 weeks to LOD 300 after capture. Because capture is a single site visit, the building's occupants barely notice the project that ends with their facility fully modeled.
The scan itself produces a registered point cloud (E57/RCP/LAS) — the raw, measurable record. Many teams work directly in it. Others need extracted deliverables: 2D AutoCAD floor plans, sections, and elevations for permitting and design, or a parametric Revit model at LOD 200–350 for coordination and clash detection. The right answer depends on what your downstream workflow consumes, and quoting only what you need is how scanning stays affordable.
A useful rule: if the project's decisions are dimensional (does it fit, where does it route), the point cloud plus targeted CAD often suffices. If the decisions are coordinative (multiple trades designing in one model), scan-to-BIM pays for itself the first time clash detection catches a conflict before fabrication.
Common questions about 3D laser scanning in Ann Arbor, Michigan
Every service below is available in this market — same crew, same equipment, same QA.