Through the Interface

Another point cloud technology on Autodesk Labs: Shape Extraction for AutoCAD 2011

I’ve been looking at (and talking about) point clouds a lot, of late, especially those generated from sets of 2D photos. Today’s announcement by Scott Sheppard refers to a new technology on Autodesk Labs that makes it even easier to work with and model using point clouds, Shape Extraction for AutoCAD 2011. I spent some time evaluating this technology, to see how it works with point clouds extracted from Photosynth, to make sure it proved useful. I used Photosynth because of the wealth of community content browsable online: Photofly content is not shared in the same way, but I... Read more →

Does anyone out there use unnamed, empty (or emptyish) groups in AutoCAD?

AutoCAD’s Product Design team are considering the possibility of automatically removing unnamed groups that are either empty or only contain a single item. The question, though, is whether anyone out there is for some reason relying on the existence of such groups, and consequently whether we would therefore be risking breaking applications or customizations should we choose to auto-purge them. So… do you have an application that uses unnamed groups with 0 or 1 items? I don’t have a firm idea of why anyone would do this, but then I’m often surprised by the innovative ways people find to... Read more →

ADN DevCast Episode 4 – using Photofly and Photosynth with AutoCAD 2011

During my recent stay in the Bay Area, Stephen suggested I join the San Rafael-based DevTech team to record another ADN DevCast. Our hope was to cut down the length somewhat by focusing on a single topic, but those plans pretty much went out the window as soon as I started talking. :-S :-) Thanks to Stephen, Gopi and Fenton for their warm welcome in San Rafael, and for keeping the session interesting with all their questions! [We experienced a few technical glitches due to my system getting very close to its end-of-life (it only has a 90 GB... Read more →

Proving the concept: one-click point cloud generation inside AutoCAD 2011 with Project Photofly

After I’d had such fun working out how to bring point clouds from Microsoft’s Photosynth into AutoCAD, I was delighted when the Autodesk Labs team came to me with the suggestion of a comparable – although ultimately more useful – integration with the then-soon-to-be-released Project Photofly. The concept was simple: provide AutoCAD users with a command allowing them to select a folder of images to upload to – and be processed by – Photofly. The resulting photo scene – once available – would then be used to generate a point cloud back inside the AutoCAD session. So basically a... Read more →

Photo Scene Editor on Autodesk Labs

I am really very excited about this technology. For those of you who’ve found my investigations into Photosynth and computer vision/photogrammetry solutions to be of interest, you’re in for a treat. :-) As Scott Sheppard has announced over on his blog, Photo Scene Editor has just gone live on Autodesk Labs: a very interesting application, in itself, but also the first public client of the Photofly web service (see this previous post for some mention of other “*fly” technologies coming from Autodesk). Photo Scene Editor allows you to build, visualize, edit and analyse “scenes” from sets of photographs. The... Read more →

Detaching an AutoCAD external reference using .NET

Here’s some simple C# code that asks the user to select an external reference and then detaches it from the current drawing: using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput; namespace XrefApplication { public class Commands { [CommandMethod("DX")] static public void DetachXref() { Document doc = Application.DocumentManager.MdiActiveDocument; Database db = doc.Database; Editor ed = doc.Editor; // Select an external reference Transaction tr = db.TransactionManager.StartTransaction(); using (tr) { BlockTableRecord btr = null; ObjectId xrefId = ObjectId.Null; // We'll loop, as we need to open the block and // underlying definition to check the block is // an external reference during... Read more →

Quite a weekend

I wouldn’t normally go into the details of the way I’ve spent my weekend, but this one was special at so many levels. On Friday, while I was attending internal meetings at our 1 Market office in San Francisco, my wife took the kids to Baker Beach. Three kids under the age of six is a lot for anyone to manage, and – while bundling them all back into the car – she managed to leave our digital SLR sitting in the parking lot. We noticed its absence when we were getting the kids ready to head up from... Read more →

Swapping AutoCAD block attribute order using .NET

A big thanks to Philippe Leefsma, from the DevTech team in Europe, for providing this handy piece of code in a response to an ADN member. In the last post we saw some code that made use of DBObject.HandOverTo() to maintain identity between an old line and a new one with which we wanted to replace it. This code makes use of this method’s counterpart, DBObject.SwapIdWith(), which works on two database-resident objects (rather than the replacement being in-memory, as is the case with HandOverTo()). Here’s C# code implementing two commands, to swap the identity (and therefore the order) of... Read more →

Shortening a set of AutoCAD lines using .NET

Brent Burgess commented on this previous post showing how to extend lines in AutoCAD: Is there a different process for shortening lines, or is it similar syntax? A very valid question… unfortunately the Curve.Extend() method only works with points or parameters that are outside the current definition of the curve, so we need to find another way (if you try, you’ll get an eInvalidInput, at least that’s what I found :-). I chose the approach of using Curve.GetSplitCurves() on each line, passing in an array of parameters at which to split the curve. I calculate the start parameter as... Read more →

Lots of exposure to "laser" technology

I’ve had quite a lot of contact with “laser” technology over the last few weeks. (In case you’re wondering about the quotation marks, that’s just a little nod to Mike Myers’ fantastic Dr. Evil character, who in the Austin Powers movies refers to now-commonplace terms – such as laser – with finger quotes. :-) A few weeks ago our friends at FARO sent across a Photon 120 laser scanner to our office in Neuchâtel, and we’ve just started getting to grips with it (if you want to see more advanced use of this technology, be sure to check out... Read more →

Arrived in San Francisco

I’ve come across to the Bay Area for three weeks with my family (which these days pretty much qualifies as a military exercise, believe me). For the first of these week’s I’ll be on vacation, catching up with friends in the area, as my wife and I lived here – back in the days before kids – for three years. It wasn’t the smoothest start to a trip, I have to admit: early last week our eldest son came down with chickenpox. We were close to cancelling, but were given the advice to play it by ear: as it... Read more →

Preview of August’s Plugin of the Month: RefUcsSpy

AutoCAD users who work with multiple reference files – whether DWG, DWF, DGN, PDF, PCG files or raster images – usually want them to be oriented in space (and to overlay) properly. One common way to make this happen is to set the various files up in world coordinates and then attach them at the origin of the referencing drawing’s WCS. A common issue related to this approach is if the user happens to be in a local UCS: the file will get attached relative to that UCS rather than to the WCS. Glenn Ryan, who generously provided April’s... Read more →