Through the Interface

Importing Minecraft data into AutoCAD

A mere 2 among 100 million registered users, my boys are crazy about Minecraft. I’ve been looking into how I might be able to help them use Autodesk tools (well, AutoCAD) to generate Minecraft content. In this post we’ll take a look at importing Minecraft data into AutoCAD, but ultimately the creation/export story is clearly more interesting (something we’ll look at in the next post, I expect). To investigate dealing with Minecraft data – bearing in mind I didn’t actually know anything much about its file formats – I took a look at the Minecraft export you can perform... Read more →

My first Autodesk 360 viewer sample

As mentioned last week, I’ve been having fun with Fusion 360 to prepare a model to be displayed in the new Autodesk 360 viewer. The sample is now ready to view, although I’m not yet quite ready to post the code directly here, mainly because the API isn’t yet publicly usable. Here’s the app for you to take for a spin, as it were. The Autodesk 360 Viewing & Data API is currently being piloted by a few key partners, and hopefully we’ll soon be broadening the scope to allow others to get involved (we first have to iron... Read more →

Steampunking a Morgan 3 Wheeler using Fusion 360

My friends in the Autodesk Developer Network team asked me to get involved with creating a sample for the API we’re planning to launch soon for the new Autodesk 360 viewer. They were quite specific about the requirements, which was very helpful: something fun, perhaps with a steampunk theme, that shows some interesting possibilities around both the HTML5 container and the embedded viewer. I was also suggested the Morgan 3 Wheeler as a possible model to look into hosting, so I really didn’t need to be asked twice. ;-) I started by tracking down a model: I ended up... Read more →

Attaching geo-location data to an AutoCAD drawing using .NET

AutoCAD’s geo-location API is a topic I’ve been meaning (and even promising) to cover for some time now. So here we are. :-) The below code sample is based on one shown at ADN’s DevDays tour at the end of 2013 – for the AutoCAD 2014 release – but the API ended up not being fully usable (at least as far as I recall: someone should jump in and correct me if I have this wrong) until the 2015 release. I’ve taken the opportunity to use Editor.Command() to call a couple of commands synchronously – to turn on the... Read more →

3 things I learned at last week’s Technical Summit

The Autodesk Technical Summit is an annual, internal, 2-day technical conference for members of Autodesk’s engineering staff. I’ve been lucky enough to attend since 2011 (the first was held in 2010), and have seen the event grow both in breadth and attendance, over the years: this year there were 500 attendees from around the world and some really excellent presentations. Most years I’ve been at the event as a presenter (I talked about F# in 2011, Kinect in 2012 and then both Kinect Fusion and Leap Motion in 2013): this is the first time I was there purely as... Read more →

Highlighting and removing blanked out AutoCAD text using .NET

I had an interesting email last week from Josh Mathews: I'm having some trouble figuring out how to fix this problem I have and I'm not sure what the best way is to attack it. I have a large set of drawings that have these random strings of underscores strewn throughout the drawing (which look like random lines scattered all around when the drawing is printed – and make it confusing to look at), and so I'm trying to write a function that will iterate through the drawing and find all the text strings that contain ONLY underscores and... Read more →

Adding a cursor badge in AutoCAD 2015 using .NET

I have to say that I’m having an absolute blast getting to know the new API features in AutoCAD 2015. It turns out I’d barely scratched the surface with my original post about the impact for developers. It’s a release that just keeps on giving. :-) One new feature that I’ve had a lot of fun playing with is the “cursor badge” capability, something you may have seen blogged about from a user’s perspective. The good news is that the ability to add your own cursor badges is provided in the public API (although I did end up using... Read more →

Jigging an AutoCAD hatch using .NET (redux)

Many thanks to Holger Rasch who worked out how to fix the code in this previous post. It really doesn’t matter that 3 years have passed, Holger – I have no doubt people will greatly appreciate the fact the code can now run without causing the annoying display issues it produced previously. Holger made a few adjustments to the implementation to make sure the persistent hatch loop gets added and removed in the right places. Here’s the updated C# code: using Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Geometry; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Colors; using System; namespace HatchJig { class JigUtils... Read more →

Implementing a custom AutoCAD object snap mode using .NET (redux)

I had an email from Martin Duke about this old post a couple of weeks ago. I started to update the original post but then realised that a) I couldn’t easily go that far back using Windows Live Writer and the built-in Typepad editor often messes up code in old posts when I edit them and b) there was some value in revisiting this topic again now that nearly 6 years has passed. I’ll hopefully manage to link to this updated post from the old one without things going awry. Martin was having some trouble with text display in... Read more →

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 →

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 →

Ray-tracing Apollonian packings

Over the weekend I managed to complete the BerkeleyX Foundations of Computer Graphics class. This was really an excellent class, both in terms of the structure of the lectures and the homework assignments, which actually scaled in a non-linear way (the last assignment took as much time to complete as the previous three combined). But you were eased into it and didn’t strictly need to do the last piece of homework (which was to write a ray-tracer from scratch) to get a “pass” on the course. What’s nice about these MOOCs is that – in order to scale, putting... Read more →

Using AutoCAD to debug external ray-tracing routines

Over the weekend I had some more fun with the ray-tracing application I’m writing for my BerkeleyX homework. This time, though, I ended up using AutoCAD to do some debugging (which was an interesting twist). The big problem with debugging an app such as a ray-tracer is that it’s hard to picture a complex 3D scene in your mind – especially when there are lots of transformations being applied to the various objects in the model. At least it’s not something my mind is at all good at. AutoCAD, on the other hand, is very good at helping you... Read more →

Writing a ray-tracer

As mentioned in this previous post – in-between bouts of preparation for AU2013 and my other work responsibilities – I’ve been spending time following an edX class on computer graphics. It’s been really beneficial: I’ve shored up some of the basics I’d missed out on studying formally at university and it was a great continuation of many of the concepts gleaned from the linear algebra class on Coursera. The final assignment in the class has been a challenge: I’ve had to write a ray-racer from the ground up. It’s been really interesting, though: there are various steps to go... Read more →

Sharpening the saw

It seems like I’m working on a number of things that I can’t talk about, at the moment, which – while the work itself is extremely stimulating – can get a little frustrating. Over my 7+ years of blogging, it seems I’ve developed a visceral need to share what I’m working on (I wonder if this is is an example of Social Media changing behaviour in general… something to ponder when I eventually find the time :-). This focus on more internal activities is, to some degree, something I anticipated when I started my “new” role but it certainly... Read more →