Through the Interface

Voxelising point clouds in Dynamo with VASA

Last week we saw a Dynamo graph that imports a point cloud from an ASCII-based format to specify the initial locations for a fun flocking simulation. This week we’re going to look at a graph that uses a similar import technique but rather creates a voxel model based on the point cloud: The main difference from the previous import code is that rather than returning a list of Point objects, we’ve tweaked the code to return 9 doubles for each point that are taken as triangle definitions. The little secret is that the triangle’s vertices are coincident: we use... Read more →

Flocking point clouds in Dynamo

I was thrilled to see a post by Long Nguyen over the weekend announcing his publication of a Dynamo package called WhatTheFlock – with full source code – that implements a Boids-like flocking simulation. This work is significant not because ornithologists will use Dynamo to predict or simulate murmurations (although that in itself is a fun thought) but because Long has demonstrated a valuable technique that might be used to implement other arguably more useful types of multi-agent simulation inside Dynamo. Long is using a background process to perform calculations before rendering the results into the Dynamo window. A... Read more →

The Autodesk Reality Solutions SDK and importing custom point clouds into AutoCAD

This isn’t exactly new news, but it was to me. Today I found out we’ve made a very useful component, the Autodesk Reality Solutions SDK, available to the public. This is a C++ library that allows you to read and write Autodesk’s RCP and RCS formats, as well as to create custom plugins for new point cloud definition formats. ADN members can log in today and download the SDK and accompanying samples. Non-members can send an email and get access to it that way. There’s a particular reason I find this to be important news: it will enable developers... Read more →

Implementing tooltips for individual points in a point cloud in the Forge viewer

In the last post we talked about a recent optimization to Dasher 360, where we implemented a point cloud rather than individual SVG-based markers for our various sensors. As mentioned, last time, this was pretty straightforward to get working, but did add some complexity: rather than having seperate DOM-resident markers – which can easily have separate tooltips assigned – we now have a single object and need to be able to display tooltips when individual points in the cloud are hovered over. Here’s the basic algorithm we used to determine when an individual sensor was being hovered over: Implement... Read more →

Updates to Autodesk ReCap and Memento

Some serious updates to our reality computing tools have been released in the last few days… here’s a quick round-up with links you can use to go and find out more. ReCap 2.2 Each member of the ReCap portfolio – ReCap, ReCap 360 and ReCap Ultimate – has significant new features in this release. Full details are available here. To summarize just a few, there are new features focused on noise clean-up of point clouds as well as optimizing them for editing performance and project size, and a number of improvements relating to creation of presentation assets such as... Read more →

First impressions of the FARO Freestyle3D scanner

Back when FARO announced their new Freestyle3D handheld scanner, I contacted them to see whether they might have one for me to take a look at. They very kindly obliged, and a few weeks ago I received a loaner model in the post. I won’t be writing an exhaustive review – at least not in this post – but I did want to share my first impressions, mainly to capture them for future discussion. Bear in mind that most of what I’m writing here is personal opinion and the rest is pure speculation :-). Hopefully someone at FARO will... Read more →

AutoCAD 2016: Extracting floorplans from point clouds using .NET

A little while ago you may remember an HTML progress meter I created while looking at “future API features”. The API feature in question was of course for AutoCAD 2016, and related to the extraction of floorplans programmatically using .NET, a topic we’re covering in today’s post. We’re going to see some fairly basic code that asks AutoCAD to analyse a point cloud – that we’re going to attach from an RCS or RCP file – and generate polyline boundaries for its floorplan. Now I didn’t actually have a great point cloud to test this, so I ended up... Read more →

AutoCAD 2016 for developers

After our quick look at AutoCAD 2016 from a user perspective, let’s now spend some time looking at the things important to developers in this latest release. Compatibility Off the bat it’s worth stating that AutoCAD 2016 is a DWG compatible release: it’s using the same file format as AutoCAD 2013, 2014 and 2015. It’s also a binary application compatible release: ObjectARX apps written for AutoCAD 2015 should work in 2016 and it’s likely that .NET apps built for AutoCAD 2014 will work, too. That said, some changes have been made to the security model for this release of... Read more →

Autodesk Memento now in public beta

One of the announcements at the recent REAL 2015 conference – and if you missed the event, as I did, you can see a great summary here – was the fact that the much-appreciated mesh manipulation tool from our Reality Solutions division, Autodesk Memento, has now entered public beta. It has graduated from Autodesk Labs and is now available for download without you having to log into the beta portal. It also has a brand new web-site describing why you might want to use it. For those of you who have been tracking its progress, release on release, here... Read more →

REAL 2015 in San Francisco from February 25-27

There’s a really interesting conference in San Francisco, later this month (groan). It’s being held in Fort Mason on February 25-27, and covers all aspects of reality computing, whether relating to capture, compute or create: Autodesk is the main organizer of the event, but there are lots of other companies and institutions involved, too. Check out the list of speakers: there are executives and specialists from Autodesk lined up as well as several eminent names from the industry. Here's a quick video giving a sense of what the conference is all about: And in case you’re still interested in... Read more →

Project Memento v1.10.12.1

The Memento product got some well-deserved airtime at Autodesk University 2014: it had prominent mentions during both the opening and closing keynotes. A new version has now been pushed live to Autodesk Labs and comes with some really useful enhancements. Full details can be found on Scott’s blog. I’ll start by talking about three enhancements I made use of for a specific project. My goal was to take some OBJ files – which had previously been generated from photos and exported by Memento – and set the coordinate system correctly for viewing in A360. Well, for use with the... Read more →

Project Memento now has direct handheld scanning

Some exciting news from the Reality Computing team: Project Memento – which has been updated to v1.0.11.3 on Autodesk Labs – now supports direct input from the Artec 3D Eva scanner. You can scan a 3D object or scene – generating a mesh – directly in the Memento software. I’ve been hoping/waiting for this to happen for some time. Here’s a quick GIF showing – in broad strokes – how the process works. I’ve basically put a bunch of screenshots together – these were captured manually rather than at regular intervals – to show the flow in a lightweight... Read more →

New Memento build and webinar

As reported over on Scott’s blog, Project Memento v1.0.10.5 is now available on Autodesk Labs. I won’t repeat the specific new features in this release – Scott covers those thoroughly – but I will say that I’m personally most excited about trying the improved .OBJ and .FBX export and the workflows that they enable. To find out more about Memento, there’s a webinar on Wednesday October 15 at 9am Pacific talking about the tool. During the webinar, Tatjana Dzambazova – whom you may have seen in her excellent TEDx session – will cover topics such from uploading photos, working... Read more →

AutoCAD integration samples for Kinect for Windows 2 –Part 4

After introducing the series, taking a look at some basic samples and then looking at importing Kinect’s high-definition face tracking data into AutoCAD, it’s time for (in my opinion) the most interesting piece of functionality provided on the Kinect SDK, Kinect Fusion. Kinect Fusion is a straightforward way to capture 3D volumes – allowing you to move the Kinect sensor around to capture objects from different angles – and the KINFUS command in these integration samples let’s you bring the captured data into AutoCAD. Which basically turns Kinect into a low-cost – and reasonably effective – 3D scanner for... Read more →

AutoCAD integration samples for Kinect for Windows 2 –Part 3

Today’s post looks at face tracking and – to some degree, at least – Kinect Fusion, two more advanced Kinect SDK features that go some way above and beyond the standard samples we saw in the last post. In Kinect for Windows v1, these features belong to an additional “developer toolkit”, although they appear to have been fully integrated into the core Kinect SDK for v2. At least that’s the case in the preview SDK. There are some additional runtime components you’ll need to copy across into AutoCAD’s program files folder to make use of these features: you’ll need... Read more →

AutoCAD integration samples for Kinect for Windows 2 –Part 2

Following on from the introduction to this series – and to the Kinect for Windows v2 sensor – it’s time to take a closer look at some of the AutoCAD integration samples. At the core of the Kinect sensor’s capabilities are really two things: the ability to capture depth data and to detect people’s bodies in the field of view. There are additional bells and whistles such as audio support, Kinect Fusion and face tracking, but the foundation is really about RGB-D input and the additional runtime analysis required to track humans. Let’s take a look at both of... Read more →

AutoCAD integration samples for Kinect for Windows 2 –Part 1

Last Friday Microsoft announced a preview SDK for Kinect for Windows 2. As the first public release of the SDK, it seems a good time to publish an initial set of samples for readers to play with. These are very much a work in progress – I tend to restart AutoCAD between Kinect Fusion captures, for instance, as otherwise I’ve been getting regular crashes – but they should give people a sense of what’s possible. And while I haven’t yet implemented certain capabilities we had before, I have gone ahead and snuck a few enhancements in (which you’ll see... Read more →

Kinect Fusion for Kinect for Windows 2

A few weeks ago I received the official retail version of Kinect for Windows 2 (having signed up for the pre-release program I had the right to two sensors: the initial developer version and the final retail version). After some initial integration work to get the AutoCAD-Kinect samples working with the pre-release Kinect SDK, I hadn’t spent time looking at it in the meantime: the main reason being that I was waiting for Kinect Fusion to be part of the SDK. The good (actually, great) news is that it’s now there and it’s working really well. For those of... Read more →

Updates to Memento and ReCap Studio

The Memento team has been beavering away, delivering a number of updates containing some really interesting features that I’ve so far neglected to mention. In the latest release (hosted on Autodesk Labs on the Autodesk Feedback Community), for instance, you can now access point cloud data via RCP export, as well as being able to generate 3D reconstructions with “Ultra” quality and smart textures (these are features you’d normally have to pay for when using Photo on ReCap 360, but this is being provided for free while it’s still on Autodesk Labs). Here’s a quick reverse chronological look at... Read more →

Christer Janson, Maker of the Day

My good friend and colleague, Christer Janson, was named 123D’s Maker of the Day a couple of weeks ago. This post is to congratulate Christer but also to talk about Christer’s background at Autodesk and the key role he plays in the AutoCAD team. I met Christer during the second round interview for my first job at Autodesk, back in 1995. I’d flown across to Switzerland for the interview, although the job itself was to be in the UK: it was a couple more years before I managed to move to Neuchatel for the first time. Back then Christer... Read more →