Through the Interface

Getting the length of the pipe centrelines in an AutoCAD drawing – Part 3

To follow on from yesterday’s post, today we’re taking a look at a more interactive – and iterative – approach to getting the length of a pipe (defined by a surface generated from an imported SAT file, we’re not talking about native Plant 3D objects). This is the second task discussed in the introductory post in this series. We’re going to add a CTRLINES2 command that asks the user to select pipe section after pipe section, and will only generate the centreline for a newly-selected section if it’s contiguous to the section of pipe that’s being “managed” (i.e. whose... Read more →

Getting the length of the pipe centrelines in an AutoCAD drawing – Part 2

After introducing the series in the last post, today we’re going to look at one potential approach for this problem: we will extract and create centrelines for surface objects created after an SAT from an external piping system has been imported into AutoCAD as well as providing a basic command to count their lengths. The code has evolved somewhat since we first saw it in this previous post: it now handles a number of previously problematic scenarios, such as the centrelines for pipe flanges being captured – it now discards polylines that intersect any cross-section circles that get captured,... Read more →

Getting the length of the pipe centrelines in an AutoCAD drawing – Part 1

Since publishing this recent post to simplify the process of generating centrelines for surfaces representing pipes – as imported from an external piping system that only generates SAT files – I’ve been thinking on and off about how best to simplify the process of measuring the lengths of these various “pipes”. Greg Robinson’s comment over the weekend spurred me on even further (thanks, Greg! :-): I'm musing on how one might code up the logic of creating a single continuous 3D poly from the horrid collection of surfaces the step file (.sat) make. This is a daunting logic issue.... Read more →

Exploding AutoCAD text and manipulating the results using .NET

Another interesting question came in by email, this week. Fredrik Skeppstedt, a long-time user of the TXTEXP Express Tool, wanted to perform a similar operation using C#: to explode text objects – as TXTEXP does – but then be able to manipulate the resulting geometry from .NET. TXTEXP is an interesting command: in order to explode text objects, it actually exports them to a Windows Metafile (.WMF) using the WMFOUT command, and then reimports the file back in using WMFIN. This, in itself, is trickier than it sounds, as WMFOUT creates the graphics in the file relative to the... Read more →

Extracting pipe centrelines from AutoCAD surfaces using .NET

This was an interesting one. I received an email from someone working on a significant BIM project that required external validation of some piping data coming from a competitive system. This system generates SAT files that – when imported into AutoCAD – represent pipes as surfaces rather than native AutoCAD (meaning Plant 3D or MEP) pipe objects. The challenge was to determine the length of these pipes inside AutoCAD, despite the fact they aren’t pipes at all. Fun! :-) The first thing I did was to take a look at the DWG data, to see what the pipes look... Read more →

Previewing geometry as it streams into AutoCAD using .NET

While developing the prototype ShapeShifter-AutoCAD integration, last week, it became clear that the user really needed something to look at as geometry was being marshalled across between the JavaScript hosting process and AutoCAD’s address space. We might have used a standard progress bar, of course, but decided to do something a bit different: implement a mechanism to take the vertices of a mesh as they are being streamed/decoded and display them inside the drawing. For us this proved to be a 2-stage process: the vertices were brought in and displayed as red, and these same vertices – as referenced... Read more →

Leaving Israel

It’s been a really interesting and productive few days here in Tel Aviv. In a sense it was too short a trip – I was penned in by commitments during the weekends either side of it – but despite that a lot was achieved. I didn’t get to see very much of the city – apart from the hotel, a restaurant, some nice lunchtime eateries and a bar or two – but I’ll definitely try to come for longer, next time around. After arriving on Tuesday and meeting with the people I’d be working most closely with during the... Read more →

Impressions of Tel Aviv

I arrived yesterday morning on the EasyJet flight from Geneva to Tel Aviv. I’d ended up spending the previous night at an airport hotel – I’d have had to leave home at 3:30am, otherwise – which meant a somewhat more tolerable 4:40am wake-up. I admit I’d been a bit concerned about security, arriving in Israel the day after Ariel Sharon’s funeral, but it turned out to be an extremely smooth arrival. Someone with my name on a board was waiting for me at the end of the jetway and they whisked me through security and customs (I could really... Read more →

Forcing AutoCAD object snapping using .NET

I was up in Adelboden, this weekend, for the Men’s FIS World Cup Slalom and Giant Slalom events. Yes, just watching – not participating :-) – although I did get the chance to catch a few much gentler slopes on my snowboard during the course of the weekend. On the Saturday – during the Giant Slalom – there was a pretty amazing incident: a young Norwegian competitor, Henrik Kristofferson, very nearly hit a television worker during his first run down. Thankfully no-one was hurt, and Henrik was very understanding about the whole thing (he was given a restart but,... Read more →

Update on purging DGN linestyles from AutoCAD drawings using .NET

Before the break, I had a characteristically insightful comment from Gilles Chanteau on a post regarding the DGNPURGE implementation that was released as a Hotfix for AutoCAD 2013 and 2014. As usual with these things, sometimes you don’t see the wood for the trees once you’ve started down a particular path. Here’s the comment in question: Just a thought, you use: for (long i = 1; i < handseedTotal; i++) ... to scan the whole database, it's a nice way i use too searching for proxies for example. But here you're looking only for entities to check their owners.... Read more →

AU 2013 classes available on-demand

Yesterday I was reminded that 200 sessions from Autodesk University 2013 were recorded and have been made available on-demand – for free! Many great classes are available as well as the keynote and innovation forum sessions. I believe you need to create a free Autodesk account to view them, if you don’t already happen to have one. In fact, here’s a screengrab from the closing keynote which happens to include a photo (taken by Shaan Hurley, of course) of me with Scott McFarlane (love the sweatshirt :-) and Owen Wengerd at the Blogger’s Social. I did a quick search... Read more →

Attack of the robots

Robots have been on my mind quite a bit, lately. They were everywhere at last month’s Autodesk University, for instance, whether the 3D scanning robot wandering around the conference – and even showing up at the Blogger’s Social – Bot & Dolly’s impressively choreographed robot at the opening keynote or LEGO Mindstorms in the Exhibit Hall. And Google has been on a crazy buying spree picking up robotics companies – they‘ve apparently acquired at least 8 during the past 12 months, including Bot & Dolly (announced while AU was still in progress, curiously enough) and the maker of the... Read more →

Happy 2014

I’d like to wish a very “Happy New Year” to all readers of the Through the Interface blog. I’m currently still up in the mountains, enjoying a few more days of snow before diving back into work, but thought I’d post a quick message to wish you all the best for the coming year. Over the next few weeks I’ll post about some thoughts I’ve been having about some potential (and hopefully very fun) robotics integrations with AutoCAD – inspired by the very cool Thymio robot that my kids got for Christmas – as well as about my first... Read more →