Through the Interface

Generating PNG files for de-skewed portions of perspective images

After getting the basic tasks worked out for the project to de-skew perspective images and attach them inside AutoCAD, I went ahead and got cracking on the next one. I’d already knocked off 1 & 2, and so decided to have a go at task 5. Why task 5? Mainly because I realised I was impatient to put some code together that writes images directly to file, if nothing else to prove that it can be solved in Python with tolerable performance. The way the overall project works is that it holds pixel information in a couple of matrices:... Read more →

First day at the Morgan Motor Company

Well, that was indeed fun. For my first afternoon in Great Malvern visiting one of my favourite Autodesk customers – the Morgan Motor Company – I took a 1/2 day Morgan 3 Wheeler familiarization course. The course was run by a company called 3 Wheel Drive (what a great name :-) and involved focused, hands-on guidance from highly-qualified advanced driving instructors. My tutor, Norm, was a former professional police driver with many years of experience on the roads around Malvern. I started the day at the MMC Visitor’s Centre: Norm met me there and introduced me to the Morgan... Read more →

Heading to the UK

I’m sitting at Geneva airport, waiting to board a Swiss flight to the UK. I’ve been hacking away in Python – and now IronPython – for the last few days, which has been very interesting. Here’s a quick update on that… I’m now managing to save out PNGs of the de-skewed portions of perspective photographs with a high degree of quality, if not with exceptional speed. I’ll post a little on the approaches I tried out – and settled on – when I get the chance. It’s now time to get the code working inside AutoCAD: I have the... Read more →

Reminder about the upcoming Portathon

A picture is worth a thousand words, so whatever your feelings about infographics this must be worth at least a hundred. ;-) Lots of people are participating in the previously announced Exchange Apps Portathon. You have 3 weeks until it starts, so it’s a good time to consider joining the fun. Here’s a note from Jim Quanci and Stephen Preston, describing the value of the event: At the risk of repeating what’s already been said: curated online marketplaces are becoming the preferred way for software users to find add-on functionality. This is also true of Autodesk software, with a... Read more →

Update on the project to de-skew images inside AutoCAD

I’ve managed to find the time to make good progress on my linear algebra class, which means I have an update to share on the image deskewing project I mentioned last week. Thanks to all of you who provided comments on that post, by the way: there’s some really valuable information there. The current implementation has been developed in Python and runs completely separately from AutoCAD. Here’s my rough integration plan to get it working in an AutoCAD plug-in: Adapt the code to make sure it can easily be applied to other images. Remove any dependencies that might stop... Read more →

Updated version of ReCap Photo available for trial

After taking a look at Project Memento, last week, using it to manipulate a mesh I’d previously created with ReCap Photo, I decided to try out the latest update to the latter of these two tools. The first thing to notice with this new, improved version of ReCap Photo is that it has its own portal showing your active projects: The tool itself works in the same way: you simply select multiple photos in Autodesk 360 and select “Create 3D model” from the action menu. In fact, all I had to do to try this new version was to... Read more →

Using Project Memento to manipulate mesh output from ReCap Photo

This morning I went back to look at Project Memento, with a view to using it to trim down a model I captured using ReCap Photo. I started with the model of the Morgan 3 Wheeler shown in this previous post. The first thing you’ll notice when launching Project Memento is the modern, chrome-free user interface making copious use of marking menus. Navigation is fairly simple using a 3-button mouse. It was straightforward to select sections of the mesh and delete them: I repeated this – along with various zoom/pan/rotate operations to make different sections of the model visible... Read more →

Applications for linear algebra: straightening out perspective

Last night I completed a really interesting lab as part of the linear algebra class that I’ve been studying. The purpose of the lab was to build up – and make use of – some Python code to process an image taken at a certain angle and “straighten out” the perspective of an image. The processing was done using matrix operations to translate between coordinate systems – something that’s bread and butter when working with CAD, so I found it particularly interesting. Here’s the image used as an example – a whiteboard with some writing that’s difficult to make... Read more →

Project Memento now available on Autodesk Labs

Once again I’m a bit late announcing this one: I had friends visiting from the UK, last week, and so took the week off (although I ended finding a fair amount of time to study linear algebra, which was surprisingly fun). I’d queued up the week’s blog posts in advance to reduce the chance of people noticing my absence. ;-) I first heard about Project Memento when I visited Singapore a few months ago (I predicted in that blog post that I’d be writing about this project the day it was live on Labs, but unfortunately that clearly didn’t... Read more →

Updated tool to understand transformation matrices in AutoCAD

As I started on my linear algebra class, some weeks ago, I decided to dust off the Transformer app I’d written a few years ago and make sure it works in AutoCAD 2014. It actually really helped me in creating appropriate transformation matrices for certain parts of the course. Coincidentally, a few days ago, I received an email from a colleague – who isn’t a programmer but seems to be working on a very interesting side project – who was interested in taking matrix input from an external system and using that to transform AutoCAD geometry. This colleague wanted... Read more →

Coursera and the future of education

It’s my mum that first pointed me at Coursera. Yes, that’s right: my mother. That’s quite an admission for a software professional to make, I’m sure you’ll agree, but then my mother does spend more time listening to the radio than I do (and there’s been some recent coverage of Coursera on BBC Radio 4). Despite this ignorance I’m actually very interested in the area of Massive Online Online Courses (MOOCs). A couple of years ago I talked about Khan Academy (which is not really classified as a MOOC, as such, but might be considered a comparable resource) and... Read more →

More fun with LeapJS and Paper.js

After my initial fooling around with combining the Leap Motion JavaScript library with Paper.js – and some gentle prompting from Kerry Brown – I started looking at how it might be possible to integrate Leap Motion support into the Meta Balls and Voronoi samples from the Paper.js website. These are both somewhat more complex samples, with Voronoi requiring an external JavaScript library. As usual with the Paper.js samples the posted versions are coded in PaperScript, so I realised I was wrong about needing to code in pure JavaScript to integrate LeapJS with Paper.js. Happy days! :-) Anyway, so it... Read more →

AutoCAD .NET training in Mexico

Augusto Gonçalves – from the ADN team based in São Paulo – asked me to post a quick note advertising an upcoming AutoCAD .NET training he’s delivering in Mexico City on September 2-3, 2013. The class is free to attend and will be delivered in Spanish. Here’s a description of the training class in Spanish and a link to the registration page. Read more →

Purging DGN linestyles from drawings not open in the AutoCAD editor

This request came in a few weeks ago regarding the source code for the recently posted DGN clean-up tool: Would you modify the tool so that it can be processed by the equivalent figure ObjectDBX (of course for AutoCAD, not RealDWG)? I would like to give the Database object to the function, and the tool would have to process them in batch (a tool for loading drawings on my side). It seemed like a reasonable enough request, so I spent some time putting together a version of the code that can be used on non-editor resident drawings. I changed... Read more →