Through the Interface

November’s Plugin of the Month live on Autodesk Labs: ScriptPro 2.0 for AutoCAD

As mentioned previously, Viru Aithal, from DevTech India, has been working hard on a replacement for the venerable ScriptPro tool. I’m delighted to say that it’s now ready, and is live on Autodesk Labs as November’s Plugin of the Month. Viru took the codebase he developed for the DWF/PDF Batch Publish tool and created ScriptPro 2.0, written from the ground up in C# and developed without any dependency on a specific AutoCAD version. Viru’s approach uses the equivalent of late binding to call into AutoCAD through COM and so doesn’t require a specific AutoCAD Type Library. Which means the... Read more →

Automatically cropping a bitmap (more quickly)

I mentioned in the last post that I was looking to optimise my approach for automatic cropping of an image. It turns out that using Bitmap.LockBits() and the corresponding UnlockBits() does indeed help, although I haven’t run any actual benchmarks to measure the difference in the two approaches. The disadvantage of this approach is that you’re a bit more down “in the weeds” when it comes to accessing the raw data – you have to support different raw image formats, for instance (and it may well be that I’ve missed some important ones – it’s only really by chance... Read more →

Automatically cropping a bitmap (slowly)

I received a few comments by email and otherwise regarding the preview capability added to the Clipboard Manager Plugin of the Month in the last post. Basically it’s useful, but only to a point: the bitmap created on the clipboard is the same size as AutoCAD’s screen, with the copied objects in their location relative to the screen. This means that if you’re working on a drawing like this: And you want to copy the leader to the left of the cursor to the clipboard, the preview you’ll end up with will be something like this: Which – when... Read more →

Updated Clipboard Manager – now with preview!

As mentioned yesterday, I went ahead and integrated previewing into the Clipboard Manager Plugin of the Month. I won’t include the code directly in the post – it’s fundamentally similar in nature to that posted yesterday and is, in any case, included in the project. There were a few additional tricks needed, such as modifying the SplitterDistance property of a SplitContainer to make sure the aspect ratio of the image gets maintained, but nothing particularly earth-shattering. Here’s the updated project – I’ll be looking into the “save between session” feature (which I suspect is going to morph into a... Read more →

Previewing the contents of the clipboard in an AutoCAD palette using .NET

I’ve been meaning to attack this one since we first published the Clipboard Manager as a Plugin of the Month: working out how to display a preview image of the clipboard contents inside the Clipboard Manager palette. And then I happened to receive a request by email, yesterday, suggesting a couple of enhancements to the tool. A nice reminder. :-) 1. Have the clipboard include image previews, similar to that of the wblock command (instead of needing to immediately rename the item when fast copying multiple items). 2. Have the clipboard store items in memory for use in between... Read more →

Changing the relative draw-order of AutoCAD objects based on their layer

Terry Dotson has – once again – generously offered an application to be an ADN Plugin of the Month. This little tool, called DrawOrderByLayer, allows you to modify the draw-order of objects in an AutoCAD drawing according to the layer they’re on. I don’t expect this to go live for another month or so (I still have plans for November’s plugin), but I did want to post it in order to give people the chance to provide feedback. Here’s basically how it works… You have layers containing geometry – in this case I’ve created circular solid hatches on layers... Read more →

A 2nd Photo Scene Editor/Photofly Competition

As with the previous contest, the winner stands to win a tricked out iPad plus a signed (by Carl Bass, Autodesk’s CEO) copy of 3ds Max or 3ds Max Design. See Scott’s blog for details. The deadline for this competition is Guy Fawkes Night, November 5th. Apparently the iPad is one of a kind, but as this is the second such competition, I have my doubts. ;-) Oh, and yes, only inhabitants of USA and Canada are eligible to win these prizes, quite sadly, but that shouldn’t stop people from entering for the fun and prestige. Read more →

SortOnVersion in F#

I had a very nice surprise in my inbox, this morning. Thorsten Meinecke, from GTB in Berlin, decided to convert the VB.NET code contained in the last post into an F# script and to share it with this blog’s readership. Thanks, Thorsten! :-) One thing about it being an F# script (typically stored in a .fsx file) is that it can be loaded and executed directly from the “F# Interactive” (FSI) component in Visual Studio without the need to build it into a project creating an executable. What’s also very nice is that the XAML defining the WPF dialog... Read more →

SortOnVersion & ScriptPro

A friend in our Product Support team in Neuchâtel asked me to help develop a little application to sort drawing files on disk. He has some old Clipper scripts that he used during a previous life as a CAD Manager to sort drawing files into different folders based on their version (held in the first six bytes of the DWG file, as mentioned in this previous post and this post of Shaan’s). We decided I’d implement it in VB.NET, to make it easier for him to understand and extend. The application is simple enough, but could make a mess... Read more →

Some miscellaneous BrowsePhotosynth changes

I just thought I’d report back on a few changes made to the BrowsePhotosynth Plugin of the Month during the course of this week. The updated version has just been announced on Scott Sheppard’s blog and I thought I’d share some of the specific implementation details. The first one (in the 1.0.1 update) was a really interesting problem and I owe a big thanks both to Alberto Venturini for reporting it and to Marat Mirgaleev, from our DevTech team in Moscow, for helping test on a comparable OS. The problem was that on all the systems upon which Alberto... Read more →

Some impressive technology

Just back from a great little break: yesterday we drove across and spent the day at the Swiss Museum of Transport in Luzern (more on that in a bit), before having dinner at the Rathaus Brauerie opposite the Kapellbrucke. Then we spent the night at the Hotel Bellevue, a very friendly hotel near the edge of Lake Luzern, and today headed across to Ballenberg – with its amazing historical view of Swiss life – before arriving home this evening. All in all a great deal of fun crammed into two short days. One of the highlights for me was... Read more →

Capturing a point cloud of a monument using a laser scanner

In this previous post I attempted to capture the geometry of a monument close to my home with approximately 500 photographs imported into Photosynth (and October’s Plugin of Month to bring it into AutoCAD, of course :-). As promised in that post, I managed to find time this weekend to go back down with a FARO Photon 120 laser scanner (which I’d mentioned in this previous post) to capture the same monument using a different technology: a 3D laser scanner. The first thing to note was there was a lot more to carry: Which clearly resulted in a much... Read more →

October’s Plugin of the Month: BrowsePhotosynth for AutoCAD

Many of you will have seen previous incarnations of this tool, during its development. It’s a little more complex than most of our other monthly plugins – mostly as it depends on a couple of external components – but the functionality should hopefully be simple enough to understand and use. I won’t go into great details here, but if you’re using AutoCAD 2011, give it a try by downloading the ZIP from the Autodesk Labs Plugin of the Month site and executing the contained installer package. From there you should be able to run the BROWSEPS command inside AutoCAD... Read more →