Through the Interface

Merry Christmas!

During the general wind-down before Autodesk’s annual “week of rest”, I’ve been spending some time this week getting more of my AutoCAD-Kinect integration samples working with the pre-release Kinect for Windows 2.0 device and SDK. Things are actually working pretty well: all samples – barring those that rely on capabilities that aren’t yet part of the SDK – are functional and some have even been enhanced based on new capabilities of the 2.0 device. For instance, I’ve reworked the “piping” sample (the one that extrudes a circular profile through 3D space) to make use of the distance between the... Read more →

Moving text in an AutoCAD block using .NET – Part 3

I wasn’t expecting to write a third part in this series of posts, but then Samir Bittar went and asked a follow-up question that I felt obliged to look into. Thanks for the suggestion, Samir! :-) Samir basically wanted to provide the user with more feedback as they’re selecting the nested entity – so that the sub-entity gets highlighted, rather than the full block reference. This turned out to be quite a tricky scenario to address. The overall approach I used was to use a PointMonitor to perform a non-interactive, nested selection of the geometry beneath the cursor and... Read more →

Disabling snapping to specific AutoCAD objects using .NET – Part 2

In the last post, we introduced the idea of preventing object snapping on certain objects by tagging them with XData and then attaching an overrule within AutoCAD to stop it from getting osnap information for them. This worked very well for standard, single-object snap modes – such as center, quad, mid, end, etc. – but didn’t work for intersection points. Intersection points are determined by calling an object’s intersectsWith() method, which can thankfully also be overruled using a GeometryOverrule. Overruling this behaviour comes with a few important caveats, though: intersectsWith() can be called in a number of different scenarios,... Read more →

Disabling snapping to specific AutoCAD objects using .NET – Part 1

Here’s a fun one that came up as a question during the recently “AutoCAD APIs: Meet the Experts” session at Autodesk University. I promised during the session that I’d address it in a blog post this week, so here we are. But I’m splitting the post into two parts, so the more complete solution will only be available next week. The problem is as follows: we want to be able to disable osnap on specific AutoCAD objects by tagging them in some way. The solution proposed by the panel during the session (I forget by whom: it could have... Read more →

Local presentations and musings on AR/VR

I’ve been sick in bed since returning from AU2013 – the fever I experienced on Thursday morning, before travelling home in the evening, was apparently due to bacterial bronchitis, and I’ve been coughing really badly over the last few days. At least the fever has passed, but I did have to cancel my plans to travel to the Munich DevDay. It would have just been too much for me to be on a series of trains for a total of 7 hours each way. Next year. Anyway, here’s a quick post I’ve had sitting around that I’ve just augmented... Read more →

Computer Science Education Week kicks off in the US

Back in March, I signed up via Code.org to see if I could get help teach basic programming skills to kids. It didn’t work out mainly because of my location – Code.org is really focused on the US – but I stayed on their mailing list and have been following their updates with great interest. For those of you who are not familiar with Code.org, it’s a resource that’s been established to promote computer science education for students. A great example of what’s being provided is the Hour of Code, which has been put together for this week’s Computer... Read more →

My week at AU 2013

I’m sitting in Heathrow Terminal 5, waiting for my connecting flight to Geneva. A good time to reflect back on another intense week at Autodesk University. I arrived in Las Vegas for this year’s AU last Saturday evening, flying via the UK on a flight that seemed full with AU attendees (even if Autodesk employees were limited to 20 per flight). Among others I bumped into Tilo Pfliegner from kubit and the CAD Professor himself, Sunith Babu. I’ve really found that having the extra day in Las Vegas – which I usually spend shopping for the family and hanging... Read more →

Moving text in an AutoCAD block using .NET – Part 2

I was planning to post about Autodesk University 2013 today, but things have just been too hectic. I have a 3-hour layover in Heathrow on the journey home – which starts this evening – so I’ll try to use that to post a summary of this year’s AU as experienced by yours truly. In the last post we saw some code to move an entity – any entity, with text as the primary requirement – in a block. Here’s a version of the C# code that shows the entity as it’s being jigged across the screen to its new... Read more →

Moving text in an AutoCAD block using .NET – Part 1

I had this question come in from Bruce Gordon by email a couple of weeks ago, and it seemed like a fun one to look at: Is it possible to write a utility to pick a text entity in a block reference and move it to a new location? As a first step, I put together some code that launches a nested entity selection and then performs a translation of the selected entity by a specified displacement from the picked point. Given the requirement in the original request, the code works “first time” for text entities (DBText and MText),... Read more →