Through the Interface

Autodesk Exchange Apps webinar

The ADN team has announced a free webinar (and free to all, not just to ADN members) on “How developers can ride and profit from the adoption wave of Autodesk Exchange Apps”, being held on June 13th, 2013. We’ve all seen how mobile-focused marketplaces such as Apple’s App Store and Google Play have revolutionised the way we find and use apps on these platforms. Apple and Microsoft have provided stores for users of their desktop operating systems to find apps that work there, too. As a large application vendor with a vibrant development community, we see an opportunity to... Read more →

Fixing block draw-order in AutoCAD drawings exported by SmartSketch using .NET

Here’s a question I received recently from Dustin Vest, who works as a PDMS administrator at Fluor: I am having a problem with Intergraph’s SmartSketch dwg files it exports... I found some code on your site that got me into the blocks, but I can’t seem to change the draworder of entities within the block. SmartPlant 3D exports all the symbols as blocks but with wipeouts on top of the rest of the block. Dustin provided some code that was very nearly working – it really didn’t need much work to get it in shape – and has kindly... Read more →

Autodesk ReCap Photo

You’re hopefully by now familiar with 123D Catch – a technology I’ve talked about before, a consumer-focused tool for reconstructing 3D models from photos – but Autodesk is also providing a professional-grade version of the system on Autodesk 360 called Autodesk ReCap Photo. To get access to the trial version of this tool, simply log in to Autodesk 360 and upload some photos of the scene you’d like to capture. You can then multi-select the photos, right-click and select “Create 3D model”. You’ll be presented with the “photo-to-3D settings” window that allows you to enter the name for the... Read more →

AutoCAD 360

I’m a few days late to the party (largely because I got a little distracted), but felt it was still worth posting on this topic: we’ve just launched AutoCAD 360, the successor to AutoCAD WS. It’s more than a straight re-branding, though: while the mobile apps for iOS and Android are updates to the existing WS-branded technology, there’s a brand new web app that’s currently in Beta. We’ve also taken the opportunity to roll out a true freemium offering, whereby the basic, free capabilities are complemented by “Pro” and “Pro Plus” mobile plans. Here’s a comparison of the offerings,... Read more →

Kinect for Xbox One

Another great week for tech. I’m in hog heaven reading all the information being shared regarding the newly-revealed Xbox One. I’m obviously most interested in the upgrade to the Kinect technology. Here’s what I’ve gleaned, thus far: Full HD with 1080p resolution Use of something called “Active IR”, a type of time-of-flight depth detection rather than relying on structured light, allowing accurate depth data even in the dark Enhanced skeleton tracking, with muscular stress and joint orientation down to the finger level Heart rate estimation, presumably using something akin to the Eulerian video magnification that made such a splash... Read more →

AutoCAD and Civil 3D API wishlist surveys

The ADN team has recently announced their annual API wishlist surveys for both AutoCAD and AutoCAD Civil 3D. Our Engineering teams take the results of these surveys very seriously, and greatly appreciate the time you take to provide us with feedback on both our APIs and their related resources. The Civil 3D survey closes on June 15th, while the one for AutoCAD closes on June 21st. Thanks in advance for your feedback! Read more →

Getting to know AutoCAD Architecture, MEP & Mechanical

Do you make regular use of AutoCAD Architecture (ACA), AutoCAD MEP (AME) or AutoCAD Mechanical (ACM)? If so, I’d be interested in hearing from you. First, some background. Something I haven’t yet talked about on this blog is an additional role I’ve picked in recent months: I’m now the (software) architect assigned to the three, above-mentioned, AutoCAD-based verticals. These products have a long history – and make quite varied use of AutoCAD’s APIs – so I was excited by the opportunity. Incidentally, this doesn’t mean the focus of this blog is changing, at all – my role for these... Read more →

Heading home

I’m at Changi airport, about to board my Swiss flight for Zurich. I had a great few days, here in Singapore, culminating in a presentation on integrating Kinect Fusion and Leap Motion with AutoCAD for members of the various engineering teams here. It was a lot of fun. Anyway, I’m heading home, now. I think I’ve set the record for my longest stay in Singapore without having participated in one of the major national pass-times (shopping), although I certainly participated heavily in the other (eating). Here’s a quick shot from the top of the Marin Bay Sands, the hotel... Read more →

In Singapore

I arrived yesterday morning in Singapore, coming in on a Singapore Airlines A380 from Zurich. It was a great flight, as far as long-hauls in economy go: comfortable seats with a great choice of films to watch (my favourite on this leg being “The Cloud Atlas”, an excellent adaptation of a brilliant novel lent to me by Jeremy Tammik a couple of years ago). I even managed to catch an hour or two of sleep, which is surprising for a daytime flight, even if it landed at 6am local time in Singapore. I rested for a few hours at... Read more →

Returning data from .NET to JavaScript inside AutoCAD

Here’s something else that may be of interest to people. As I was working towards the solution shown in the last post – before Albert told me about the ucsToWorld() function (thanks, Albert :-) – I ended up extending the .NET code we saw in the previous post to include a TransformToWcs() method (marshaled by a transToWcs() function on the JavaScript side of things). What’s interesting about this function – and has caused me to show it here, despite its existence being rendered redundant by ucsToWorld() – is that it returns a value to the caller by serializing point... Read more →

Jigging AutoCAD geometry in an arbitrary UCS using JavaScript

I’ve learned a few things since the last post, where we complemented AutoCAD’s new JavaScript API with some additional .NET functionality to work around an issue that existed in the code we’d developed in the previous two posts. Firstly, I found out there’s a better way for your jig to display transient graphics than via “manual” calls to addTransient(), updateTransient() and eraseTransient(). Acad.Jig exposes an update() function you can call, passing in the xml fragment representing your geometry. The jig will manage the display of the transient and clear it at the end. (Thanks to Sherry Tan for pointing... Read more →

Complementing AutoCAD’s JavaScript API using .NET

After having some fun writing our first jig inside AutoCAD, last week, and calling it either from an HTML page or an AutoCAD command defined in a .js file, in today’s post we’re going to see how we can use AutoCAD’s .NET API to extend its new JavaScript layer. We’re going to take a concrete problem we had in last week’s implementation: it turns out that when you draw a transient circle beneath the cursor using JavaScript – as we do during our jig – it absorbs mouse clicks. This is something we’ve logged as an issue, but it... Read more →

Jigging an AutoCAD circle from a JavaScript-defined command

Just to complement yesterday’s post showing how to define a simple jig using JavaScript, here’s the same code from a separate .js file: var doc = Acad.Application.activedocument; var center = new Acad.Point3d(0, 0, 0); var radius = 0; var trId; function pointToString(pt) { var ret = pt.x.toString() + "," + pt.y.toString() + "," + pt.z.toString(); return ret; } function createCircle(cen, rad, first) { // Build an XML string containing data to create // an AcGiTransient that represents the circle var cursor = ''; var drawable = '' + 'Read more →

Jigging an AutoCAD circle using JavaScript

After talking about the architecture of our JavaScript API in this recent post – and mentioning the approach we expect developers to take when creating geometry in one of the comments – I thought it would be worth spending the time to write my first JavaScript jig in AutoCAD. For those of you who haven’t come across jigs in either ObjectARX or AutoCAD .NET, jigs are the primary way applications request users to dynamically specify geometric parameters while providing them with graphical feedback. As users select points or specify distances, the object or objects they’re creating are updated in... Read more →