The Fire Tower
Bucharest

The Fire Tower, built in Bucharest at the end of the 19th century, was originally designed as a fire watch tower and served as a strategic post for firefighters, being the tallest building in the city at the time (almost 50 m) . With a supple and elegant structure, the tower remains a symbol of Bucharest’s old fire protection measures. Since 1936, The Fire Tower has been transformed into various spaces, and since 1963 it has become the National Museum of Firefighters, highlighting their history and evolution. Today, The Fire Tower continues to be an important cultural and historical landmark of the city.
EXPLORE THE 3D MODEL
About the Project
The Fire Tower houses the National Museum of Firefighters which is under the administration of the General Inspectorate for Emergency Situations Bucharest (GIES).
This project was made due to winning the auction - "Acquisition of Digitization service of the heritage objective within the National Museum of Firefighters project The Fire Tower financed through the Regional Operational Program Bucharest-Ilfov 2021-2027"
The goal of the project was to obtain a coloured point cloud that can be visualized on an open source platform (in this case Sketchfab) of The Fire Tower.
Quantifiable Data
• Number of laser scanning stations: 308
• Number of drone photos: 228
• Number of ground photos: 566
• Processing of the data resulting from the scan: 18 hours
• Postprocessing I - (removal of geometry errors and artifacts): 50 hours
• Postprocessing II - (remodeling in specialized software to obtain the optimized model): 300 hours
• Initial point cloud: 1 Billion points
• Final point cloud: 6 million points
About the Process
5 days of activity in the field were required for the 3D scanning of the objective and the following specialized equipment was used:
FIELD DATA COLLECTION:
• Trimble X7 terrestrial laser scanner generating a total of 308 laser stations (of which 296 have been preserved) plus a total of 26 detailed scans of certain particular areas where more data collection was required in order to obtain a high quality point cloud. For each scanning position, panoramic pictures were taken by means of the cameras equipped on the scanner. Each panoramic picture has the resolution of 5376 x 2688 pixels, having 14.45 MP.
• Parrot Anafi drone used to capture a total of 228 aerial photos to collect data from high areas (e.g.: roof and the windows of the higher levels)
• Canon EOS 90D camera used to capture 566 outdoor shots from the ground to collect texture and color data.
DATA PROCESSING:
This step was done in Agisoft Metashape Software. After 18 hours of processing, an initial point cloud of 1.5 billion points was generated, which was then been reduced to 25 million points to optimize the workflow. The final point cloud after cleaning has 6 million points and was uploaded to the Sketchfab platform.
3D MODEL OPTIMIZATION:
In addition an optimized 3D model was created, based on the information obtained through scanning. This digital product was created by 3D reconstructing the objective based on the point cloud resulting from the 3D scanning. Design softwares such as ArchiCAD and Rhinoceros were used to reconstruct the 3D model, which allowed us to correct all the artifacts generated after scanning for reasons related to the location. The optimized 3D model was georeferenced using the data obtained from the point cloud and can be introduced into open-source GIS softwares.
VIEW THE POINT CLOUD