Through the Interface

Conceptual modeling in a drone-captured environment

I thought I was done with my posts for the week, but this was too good not to share. The below video shows a scene being captured using a GoPro Hero 3 Black edition on a 5-second timelapse setting mounted on a DJI Phantom drone and processed with Photo on ReCap 360 before being used as a basis for a conceptual model created in Revit 2014. Phew. This is very much a proof-of-concept rather than a genuine project – no architect was involved, for instance – but it does a good job of showing the possibilities of this kind... Read more →

Autonomous mobile robots

Aside from being St. Valentine’s Day, Friday is notable as it marks the beginning of the first ever ETHx class, “AMRx – Autonomous Mobile Robots”. ETHx is the moniker being used by the prestigious technical institution ETH Zurich for the MOOC courses they’re delivering as part of edX. This is exciting: despite the fact I live close enough theoretically to attend classes at ETH Zurich in person, I’m very happy to be able to do so from the comfort of my home. The topic is itself very interesting… the “environment perception” piece alone looks as though it should cover... Read more →

Reality Computing updates

I’ve pulled together a few miscellaneous updates that relate to Autodesk’s Reality Computing efforts, which – as I mentioned earlier – is a term that’s intended to include “Reality Capture” at the beginning, followed by “Reality Modeling and Analysis” and then “Reality Delivery”. Firstly, looking at the capture side of things… Photo on ReCap 360 (the new name for ReCap Photo) now has free and paid versions available. Although at the time of writing it’s still possible to make use of the soon-to-be-paid benefits for free, but do hurry! Preview mode – with up to 50 source images of... Read more →

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 →

First impressions of Kinect for Windows 2.0 pre-release

I was hoping to get the Kinect for Windows 2.0 pre-release developer kit in time for AU – so I can talk about it intelligently, even if I don’t end up demoing it – so when the UPS delivery man showed up, yesterday, I was very happy. As always, it started with a simple box: Which, once opened, revealed some nice monochrome graphics: And the device itself, of course (tripod is model’s own ;-). The addition of the tripod screw-hole on the bottom is very welcome: I ended up buying a somewhat flimsy and unstable 3rd party tripod for... Read more →

Scanning the Fountain of Justice using Kinect Fusion and AutoCAD

As mentioned in yesterday’s post, on Monday I spent a few hours in the early morning at the local archeological museum, the Laténium. While this is nowhere near the scale of the Smithsonian, it is the largest archeological museum in Switzerland and is well known by people in the field, especially those interested in La Tène culture. I love the Laténium – our kids often seem to go there for birthday parties, which certainly beat the ones held at the local McDonalds – and so I was delighted to get to go “behind closed doors” (the museum is closed... Read more →

Browsing parts of the Smithsonian catalog online in 3D

Last week was an exciting one for the organisation at Autodesk that works on “Reality Computing” (a broader term I’ve seen recently that includes “Reality Capture” at the beginning, followed by “Reality Modeling and Analysis” and then “Reality Delivery”). Their big announcement was a partnership with the Smithsonian – the venerable Washington DC-based institution that is the world’s largest museum and research complex – to bring digital scans of many important exhibits online and accessible to all via the Smithsonian x3D Explorer. Shaan talks about the announcement in depth on his blog. I won’t repeat what he’s said over... Read more →

Running drone-captured data through ReCap Photo

Earlier this year I came to know about a “local” company called senseFly. (When I say local, I mean they’re also in the French-speaking area of Switzerland, which is a relatively small region of a small country… I suppose that would be considered local by some standards. :-) senseFly started as a spin-off of the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). (EPFL is one of the two top technical universities in Switzerland, the other being Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH Zürich)). They specialise in making unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – drones – and now belong to the Parrot... Read more →

Kinect Fusion: comparing approaches for point cloud generation inside AutoCAD

Something you realise quite early on when working with the Kinect Fusion component in the Microsoft Kinect SDK is that it’s really meant to integrate into a 2D UI: it takes care of rendering the volume that’s being mapped, and you simply have to integrate the generated bitmap somewhere into your app’s UI. The primary benefit of this approach is its low latency: it all happens very quickly and the only data you need to move from the runtime into your app is the bitmap itself. With 3D systems such as AutoCAD, though, you really want to take the... Read more →

Kinect Fusion updated to include colour

A few weeks ago the Kinect SDK was updated to version 1.8. I’d been eagerly awaiting this update for one reason, in particular: aside from receiving some updates to provide more robust tracking – something that was very much needed – Kinect Fusion has now been updated to include realistic colours in the output. There are some additional SDK enhancements, such as a background removal APIs (good for greenscreening) and HTML support (handy for interactive kiosks), but the ones that interest me most relate to Kinect Fusion. There are a few new Kinect Fusion samples that I need to... Read more →

Using Project Falcon with a ReCap Photo model – Part 2

In the last post we took a look at how we could make use of the .obj output from a ReCap Photo model of a car to perform virtual wind tunnel analysis using the standalone version of Project Falcon, a flow simulation tool currently on Autodesk Labs. This post extends (or forks) that workflow to achieve my goal of performing virtual wind tunnel analysis on a Morgan 3 Wheeler in the AutoCAD-based version of Project Falcon. After stitching a 3D scene from photos using ReCap Photo – and exporting it to .obj – we need to bring the model... Read more →

Using Project Falcon with a ReCap Photo model – Part 1

Here’s the thing. While it’s nice to be able to capture interesting-looking models with Autodesk ReCap Photo, what we really want is an output format that’s useable in other products. In my case, what I personally wanted to do was first hinted at in this post: display a model of the Morgan 3 Wheeler in a virtual wind tunnel using Project Falcon (a project on Autodesk Labs which is – at the time of writing – scheduled to run until August 30, 2013). So let’s take a look at the output formats of the ReCap Photo service and see... Read more →

Comparing 123D Catch with ReCap Photo

My apologies if you’ve reached this post while looking for a detailed comparison or analysis of these two products: this is just me sharing some anecdotal experience I’ve had of uploading – and working with – the same dataset in the two systems. The subject I chose for this comparison is somewhat strange, as it’s notoriously hard to use photogrammetry to reconstruct 3D models from cars: they’re generally too shiny. But while this particular car has plenty of shiny, its main body of paintwork is a gorgeous matte silver, so I thought I’d take a chance with it. I’ve... Read more →

Autodesk ReCap Photo

You’re hopefully by now familiar with 123D Catch – a technology I’ve talked about before, a consumer-focused tool for reconstructing 3D models from photos – but Autodesk is also providing a professional-grade version of the system on Autodesk 360 called Autodesk ReCap Photo. To get access to the trial version of this tool, simply log in to Autodesk 360 and upload some photos of the scene you’d like to capture. You can then multi-select the photos, right-click and select “Create 3D model”. You’ll be presented with the “photo-to-3D settings” window that allows you to enter the name for the... Read more →

Taking reality capture to the next level: 3D scentsing

I’m excited to announce some revolutionary new technology our "reality capture” team is working on at Autodesk. By now many people will be familiar with the Rip-Mod-Fab workflow (the 3D equivalent of Rip-Mix-Burn for music). The problem with this is that there’s something fundamental missing from the equation: that most aromatic of dimensions, the world of odours. How many of you have used 123D Catch to copy a real-world object, printing it using with MakerBot, only to find something missing? That once you’ve got over the utter coolness of being able to print something in three dimensions, you’re somehow... Read more →

Kinect Fusion inside AutoCAD

OK, here goes: my first (public) attempt at integrating the brand new Kinect Fusion functionality – made available this week in v1.7 of Microsoft’s Kinect for Windows SDK – into AutoCAD. There are still a few quirks, so I dare say I’ll be posting an update in due course. As mentioned in the last post, I’ve been working on this for some time but can now show it publicly, as the required SDK capabilities have now been published. As part of this effort, I’ve gone ahead and made sure the other Kinect samples I’ve written for AutoCAD work with... Read more →

Kinect Fusion released today!

This is very exciting: v1.7 of the Kinect for Windows SDK is being released today and it includes the uber-cool Kinect Fusion component. For those of you who have not yet heard of Kinect Fusion, it allows you to use your Kinect for Windows sensor as an effective reality capture device: it aggregates input from depth frames provided by the Kinect sensor, mapping out a 3D volume. Or, for the layperson, it allows you to paint a 3D model of an existing real-world object or scene into your computer’s memory. Here’s a video from Engadget’s Expand event, held over... Read more →

Integrating Kinect with AutoCAD 2013

As promised in the last post, today we’re going to see the adjusted point cloud import workflow applied to the previously posted Kinect integration samples. This was also an opportunity to look at the improvements in version 1.5 of the Kinect for Windows SDK. When the SDK was announced, my initial reaction was “OK, but what we really need is finger-tracking”, especially as it was right around the time Leap Motion made their big announcement. But there have nonetheless been some really interesting capabilities added to the Kinect SDK with version 1.5: Seated mode skeletal tracking You can choose... Read more →

Indexing point clouds programmatically in AutoCAD 2013

Thanks to RS for raising this issue via a blog comment and to my esteemed colleague, Christer Janson, for suggesting the solution during England’s epic Euro 2012 victory over Sweden on Friday evening (sorry, Christer – I couldn’t help but rub it in just a little ;-). On a slightly more serious note, I find it very painful to watch England play, at the best of times, and while I was happy “we” won, I was sad to see Sweden left with no chance of continuing past the group stage. So it goes. Those of you who have played... Read more →

Coming soon: Kinect for your PC

You’re probably thinking I’ve been talking about little else other than making Kinect work with your PC, of late (and not only because I’ve had a class to prepare for AU, I also think this technology has the potential to be very significant), but I did feel it was worth pointing out this important announcement from Microsoft: early next year (which presumably now means weeks away) we’ll see a version of Kinect that’s specifically intended to work with Windows systems (rather than the current version of the device that’s really intended to be a controller for the Xbox 360).... Read more →