Through the Interface

Happy Halloween!

We had some friends over for a Halloween party on Saturday. Inspired by a friend who loves this kind of illusion, we managed to put together a version of Pepper’s Ghost, to entertain the guests and Trick or Treaters. It was simple enough: an LCD screen (we had fooled around with a projector, but this worked better), laid down in my daughter’s play-house, with a sheet of Plexiglas angled at 45 degrees to reflect the screen’s image – which from a distance made it look as though it was floating in the air inside the playhouse. The main trick... Read more →

Recorded AutoCAD .NET training available for download

Over the last couple of months, Wayne Brill has been delivering online AutoCAD .NET training. The training has received very positive feedback from attendees. Recordings of most of the sessions are now (or will soon be) available from our online API webcast archive (which is also accessible via http://autodesk.com/apitraining –> Webcast Archive). You’ll notice that the recordings start with session 2: we had some technical issues with the first week’s recording, but as the material for these classes is essentially the same material as that used for Wayne’s DevTV sessions (which are all linked to from this post, including... Read more →

Creating a legend of AutoCAD drawings using .NET

This interesting question came up in our discussion forums: Does anyone have a routine that will insert all the drawings from a single folder into one drawing to create a legend sheet? I'm trying to document the company's various blocks and details for dissemination amongst several offices. The simplest – and most elegant, in my opinion – approach for addressing this requirement is via the Table object, which allows you to include block thumbnails in each of its cells. So we would need to import the various drawings into the current drawing as blocks, and then point the various... Read more →

Using the Microsoft Kinect SDK to sweep segmented solids inside AutoCAD

This post follows on from this recent post which showed a flat port of the previous OpenNI/NITE code which swept a single solid along a spline path defined by the user being tracked by the Kinect device. As mentioned, the previous approach was ultimately flawed, as adding vertices to our spline path made the whole thing problematic (as the sweep operation became less and less likely to succeed). The updated code adopts a slightly different approach: it creates the solid in segments, creating a new segment whenever there’s an error encountered or when the current segment exceeds a certain... Read more →

Identifying holes in an AutoCAD solid using .NET

A big thanks to Ishwar Nagwani – an old friend, colleague and member of Autodesk Consulting working in our Bangalore office – for kindly providing this code. Ishwar tells me that he has come across many developers struggling to identify holes in 3D solid using its boundary representation (Brep). The code he has provided works on the basis that a hole’s normal is typically facing inwards and will therefore intersect the hole’s axis of symmetry, providing we extend the line representing the normal by the hole’s radius and the line representing the axis of symmetry by the cylinder’s height... Read more →

Using the Microsoft Kinect SDK to sweep simple solids inside AutoCAD

After this previous post, which updated my previous implementation drawing polylines in AutoCAD to use the Microsoft Kinect SDK, it made sense to give the same treatment to this implementation, too. This version of the code doesn’t really go beyond the OpenNI/NITE version – it’s very much a “flat” port, which means it comes with the same issues the other version had: the sweep is performed along a single, increasingly complex path, which means that it quickly slows down (as the path’s complexity increases with its length) and at some point just stops working. And along the way, there’s... Read more →

Of pyramids and platforms

While I’m working through the inevitable backlog of tasks that build up during a 2-week vacation, I thought I’d post something quickly about some of the events of the last fortnight. I’ll get back on with AU preparation and related technical posts later this week, I hope. Firstly, a few people have asked me about our trip to Egypt. We spent the first big chunk of our holiday at the beach, relaxing, snorkelling and scuba-diving. I actually stayed away from any kind of electronic communication for the whole time we were in El Quseir: the only news that managed... Read more →

Back from Egypt

I’ve just returned from an amazing vacation in El Quseir (which I’ve now also seen written as Al Qusayr, El Qusair, Quesir, Qusseir, Qosseir, or Kosseir), on the Red Sea coast of Egypt. On the way back we spent a day in Cairo, visiting the pyramids and the incredible Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. I’m not officially back from vacation until Monday, but will be starting to get caught up on email and blog comments. In the meantime, here’s a little panorama from our visit to the pyramids in Giza. Read more →

Using the Microsoft Kinect SDK to model 3D polylines inside AutoCAD

After using the Microsoft Kinect SDK to bring point clouds into AutoCAD and then to track skeleton information, I’m happy to report that I now have an equivalent implementation of this previous post, where we used OpenNI and NITE to understand gestures captured by the Kinect and draw 3D polylines inside AutoCAD. This implementation is a bit different from the last, mainly in that – given the additional calculation needed to map points into “skeleton space” when building out point cloud – I no longer transform all the points and then select a sampling. This implementation passes a sampling... Read more →

Displaying an AutoCAD ribbon tab contextually using .NET

This very interesting feature came to my attention via an internal discussion. Thanks, once again, to George Varghese for providing the base sample used for this post. At various times inside AutoCAD – such as when a block is selected, for instance – a specific ribbon tab is displayed “contextually”. As an example, when you select a Hatch object inside the AutoCAD editor, you should see a hatch-related contextual tab displayed: It’s possible to implement your own, comparable behaviour inside the AutoCAD editor using a combination of a simple .NET module, a XAML file and some CUI editing (or... Read more →

Delete “all but current” Annotation Scales on AutoCAD objects using .NET

I stumbled across this wishlist request on the forums, the other day, and thought it worth covering in a blog post. It’s an interesting little piece of code – nothing very startling, but obviously whenever removing data you have to be a bit careful: in fact I would probably add an “are you sure?” question prior to actually removing the various annotation scales, even if the operation participates in the undo mechanism and can therefore be rolled back easily by the user. Here’s the C# code for the AIOBJECTSCALEREMOVEOTHERS command (yes, I would normally use a slightly more succinct... Read more →

Using the Microsoft Kinect SDK to capture skeleton data inside AutoCAD

To follow on from my post showing how to get point cloud information from Kinect into AutoCAD – using Microsoft’s official SDK – this post looks at getting skeleton information inside AutoCAD. The code in today’s post extends the last – although I won’t go ahead and denote the specific lines that have changed – by registering an additional callback called by the Microsoft runtime which, in turn, stores data in memory to be displayed when the jig’s WorldDraw() is next called inside AutoCAD. The main thing to note is what’s needed to map the skeleton information into AutoCAD’s... Read more →