Through the Interface

Sweeping an AutoCAD solid dynamically using Kinect

After focusing on a manual process for sweeping a solid inside AutoCAD in this previous post, it seemed to make sense to attempt to automate more of that process. In the code in this post, we take a standard circular profile – of a user-specified radius – and sweep it along the path defined by the user’s hand movements. Back in the original Kinect integration example we created a 3D polyline path linking every position of the user’s hand detected by Kinect. This makes a very jittery path for our purposes, so we’re going to define a spline along... Read more →

AutoCAD .NET Training DevTV Session 4: Database Events, PaletteSet

Another Friday, another installment of Wayne Brill’s AutoCAD .NET training DevTV series (to complement those from previous weeks). Today’s session is focused on responding to database events and creating a palette-based user interface. This series of DevTV sessions is a companion for the new AutoCAD .NET training material available from the AutoCAD .NET Developer Center. Enjoy! :-) Read more →

Connecting AutoCAD WS to SharePoint & a live Facecast

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about AutoCAD WS, even though the application is proving hugely popular on its various platforms: whether inside a web browser or on iOS and Android devices. There have been some really interesting capabilities exposed, lately, which are making it increasingly interesting to the development community. One, in particular, that I’d like to talk about today is the ability for AutoCAD WS to connect to sites supporting the WebDAV protocol. I’ve used WebDAV a number of times, over the years, mainly with ProjectPoint and SharePoint. It’s certainly possible to set up your own... Read more →

API wishlist surveys for Autodesk products

Our annual API wishlist surveys are now live: AutoCAD® AutoCAD® Civil 3D® Revit® Autodesk Inventor® Autodesk Navisworks® Please do take the time to provide us with your input: it’s one of the most direct ways to influence the direction of the Autodesk products you customize or for which you develop applications. Our various Engineering teams take this feedback very seriously when prioritising the APIs to expose over the coming releases of our software. And if you (optionally) provide your email address in the survey, I’ll send you a copy of the results once they’ve been compiled. The surveys will... Read more →

AutoCAD .NET Training DevTV Session 3: Database Fundamentals

Another Friday, another installment of Wayne Brill’s AutoCAD .NET training DevTV series (to complement those from previous weeks). Today’s session is focused on the fundamentals of AutoCAD’s drawing database. This series of DevTV sessions is a companion for the new AutoCAD .NET training material available from the AutoCAD .NET Developer Center. Enjoy! :-) Read more →

Sweeping an AutoCAD solid from Kinect-captured geometry

In this previous post we looked at some code to capture and combine a series of point clouds using a Kinect sensor. In today’s post we’re going to take a very slightly modified version of the code – which really only adds the feature to let the user choose when the sequence of captures should start by clicking, rather than it just starting at the beginning of the command – to capture the geometry created by dragging a 2D cross-section in 3D space. The code in the last post clearly played a big part in helping digitise the profile... Read more →

Jigging an AutoCAD circle from three points in arbitrary 3D space using .NET

I suspect that many of you who have worked with point clouds will have come across this issue: the standard CIRCLE command in AutoCAD will create the circle on the plane of the active User Coordinate System (UCS), even when the circle is defined by three points on its circumference. This behaviour is probably fine for the majority of 2D drafting activities, but if you want to create circles from a point cloud – by selecting points from its perimeter using the Node object snap – then it’s less than ideal. The code in today’s post implements a very... Read more →

AutoCAD .NET Training DevTV Session 2: User Interaction – User Input

It’s Friday, which means it’s time for the next installment of Wayne Brill’s AutoCAD .NET training DevTV series (as mentioned in last Friday’s post). Today’s session is focused on user interaction and user input. This series of DevTV sessions is a companion for the new AutoCAD .NET training material available from the AutoCAD .NET Developer Center. Enjoy! :-) Read more →

ADN DevCast Episode 6 – Autoloader

They’ve been at it again. Stephen and Fenton have recorded another informative DevCast, this time on the new simplified application loading mechanism in AutoCAD 2012, the Autoloader. I’ll be following up with my own experience of using Autoloader, in due course, but this should be a great “getting started” resource. Read more →

Capturing and combining multiple Kinect point clouds inside AutoCAD

Over the weekend, I had more fun exploring the use of Kinect with AutoCAD. It was prompted by an email I had from a UK-based creative team who are interested in the potential of capturing time-lapse point clouds using Kinect. They were curious whether the quality of data coming from the Kinect device would be adequate for doing some interesting trompe l’oeil video compositions. I started by taking the code from last week’s Kinect post: I removed the code related to gesture detection and beefed up the point-cloud related implementation to deal with composite point clouds that are built... Read more →

New self-paced AutoCAD .NET training material

Wayne Brill, a member of the DevTech Americas team, has been beavering away on a new set of training material for AutoCAD .NET. This material is now live on the AutoCAD Developer Center (the image on the right should help you locate the link). This new material contains information on the following topics: Overview of .NET Plugin Basics User Interaction Database fundamentals Dictionaries User Interface Events InputPoint Monitor Jigs To accompany this material, Wayne has also recorded a set of DevTV sessions, which I’ll be serialising over the coming weeks. Here are links to the introduction and the first,... Read more →

Copying rows between AutoCAD tables using .NET

Thanks to Marat Mirgaleev, a member of our DevTech team based in Moscow, for the code that inspired this post. The code in this post implements the simple case of taking the last two rows of one table and copying them into the same relative position in another table. If the destination table is smaller, it gets expanded, as do the individual rows and columns. Other than that, there’s not much to it. I have tried to structure the code to make it easy to adapt to more “challenging” tasks, such as taking an arbitrary, rectangular selection of cells... Read more →

Calling unexposed ObjectARX methods using P/Invoke from .NET

As promised, last week, today we’re going to look at a technique pointed out to me by Viru Aithal for calling unexposed ObjectARX member functions via P/Invoke. It sometimes happens that ObjectARX (unmanaged C++) methods fail to get exposed immediately via .NET, which is currently the case for MLeader.Scale (both getting and setting this property). The technique shown in this post allows you to work around this, prior to the managed API in AutoCAD being updated to include it. It’s worth noting that if you need a more complex exposure via .NET – as Dan Smith sometimes reminds me... Read more →