Through the Interface

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 →

Using the Microsoft Kinect SDK to model 3D polylines inside AutoCAD

After using the Microsoft Kinect SDK to bring point clouds into AutoCAD and then to track skeleton information, I’m happy to report that I now have an equivalent implementation of this previous post, where we used OpenNI and NITE to understand gestures captured by the Kinect and draw 3D polylines inside AutoCAD. This implementation is a bit different from the last, mainly in that – given the additional calculation needed to map points into “skeleton space” when building out point cloud – I no longer transform all the points and then select a sampling. This implementation passes a sampling... Read more →

Using the Microsoft Kinect SDK to capture skeleton data inside AutoCAD

To follow on from my post showing how to get point cloud information from Kinect into AutoCAD – using Microsoft’s official SDK – this post looks at getting skeleton information inside AutoCAD. The code in today’s post extends the last – although I won’t go ahead and denote the specific lines that have changed – by registering an additional callback called by the Microsoft runtime which, in turn, stores data in memory to be displayed when the jig’s WorldDraw() is next called inside AutoCAD. The main thing to note is what’s needed to map the skeleton information into AutoCAD’s... Read more →

Using the Microsoft Kinect SDK to bring a basic point cloud into AutoCAD

As mentioned, last week, I’ve been working away to port my previous OpenNI/NITE AutoCAD-Kinect integration across to the official (although still in Beta) Microsoft Kinect SDK. Today’s post presents a very basic implementation – essentially equivalent to the code in this previous post – which makes use of the Microsoft Kinect SDK to bring a colourised point cloud into AutoCAD. As in the previous post, the txt2las tool is still currently needed to bring the generated point cloud into AutoCAD. It’s worth noting that the Microsoft SDK is a) much simpler to install/deploy and b) provides more reliable colourisation... Read more →

Taking a REST

Actually, I wish that were true. I’m planning on taking some time off in October, but that seems a long way off, at this stage. What I’ve actually been doing is working with some REST-based APIs: firstly, I’ve been finishing up work on September’s Plugin of the Month, TransTips for AutoCAD, Revit, Inventor, & 3ds Max (to be posted on Autodesk Labs in the next few days). TransTips makes use of the REST API for Bing Translator, to automatically translate tooltips in various products. Secondly, perhaps more excitingly, I’ve been coding against a possible future web service API for... Read more →

Finally working with the Async CTP for VS 2010

I’ve been planning to look at it for ages – and have certainly mentioned it before – but other things have kept on cropping up. Well last Thursday, on my train trip back from Wallisellen (the home of Microsoft Switzerland), I finally managed to take the plunge and start working with the Async CTP for Visual Studio 2010. I’d been in Wallisellen to attend an MSDN TechTalk presentation by Stephen Toub, Principal Architect on Microsoft’s Parallel Computing Platform team. I’ve followed Stephen via his blog – and the Parallel Programming with .NET blog – for a long time, and... Read more →

Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly 2.0

I’ve been really excited about this release, ever since I saw the technology in action at last year’s AU. The first release of the technology was interesting, but this version really takes things to a new level: you can generate a fully textured mesh from a set of photographs. A lot of work has clearly been done on the technology to address scalability issues: I have a set of close to 500 images of a local monument, which previously was not handled by the Photofly service (for which the Photo Scene Editor is the main client application). Now, though,... Read more →

Sweeping an AutoCAD solid dynamically using Kinect

After focusing on a manual process for sweeping a solid inside AutoCAD in this previous post, it seemed to make sense to attempt to automate more of that process. In the code in this post, we take a standard circular profile – of a user-specified radius – and sweep it along the path defined by the user’s hand movements. Back in the original Kinect integration example we created a 3D polyline path linking every position of the user’s hand detected by Kinect. This makes a very jittery path for our purposes, so we’re going to define a spline along... Read more →

Sweeping an AutoCAD solid from Kinect-captured geometry

In this previous post we looked at some code to capture and combine a series of point clouds using a Kinect sensor. In today’s post we’re going to take a very slightly modified version of the code – which really only adds the feature to let the user choose when the sequence of captures should start by clicking, rather than it just starting at the beginning of the command – to capture the geometry created by dragging a 2D cross-section in 3D space. The code in the last post clearly played a big part in helping digitise the profile... Read more →

Capturing and combining multiple Kinect point clouds inside AutoCAD

Over the weekend, I had more fun exploring the use of Kinect with AutoCAD. It was prompted by an email I had from a UK-based creative team who are interested in the potential of capturing time-lapse point clouds using Kinect. They were curious whether the quality of data coming from the Kinect device would be adequate for doing some interesting trompe l’oeil video compositions. I started by taking the code from last week’s Kinect post: I removed the code related to gesture detection and beefed up the point-cloud related implementation to deal with composite point clouds that are built... Read more →

Enhanced Kinect integration for 3D polyline creation

I’ve improved the basic implementation in this previous post pretty significantly over the last week: New ability to draw multiple polylines Added a gesture of lowering/raising the left hand to start/finish drawing with the right Addition of a transient sphere as a 3D cursor for polyline drawing Quick flash of a transient skeleton (arms and chest only) on user detection The jig now perpetuates by changing the screen cursor minutely to and fro Mouse input is needed to keep the jig active; Kinect input doesn’t yet count :-) A new gesture of placing hands together to end drawing At... Read more →

Using Kinect to draw 3D AutoCAD polylines

As promised in this previous post, I’ve been playing around with understanding Kinect gestures inside AutoCAD. My first step – after upgrading the OpenNI modules and drivers to more recent versions, which always seems time-consuming, for some reason – was to work out how to get gesture information via nKinect. It turned out to be very straightforward – as it’s based on OpenNI and NITE, the user-tracking and gesture detection come pretty much for free. A few things I had to work out: We needed a “skeleton callback”, which is called when body movements are detected Because this is... Read more →

Previewing and capturing Kinect sensor data directly inside AutoCAD

Now things are getting interesting. :-) It took me some effort to get this working, but looking at the results I think it was worth it. As mentioned in the last post, I’ve been trying to get a live feed from the Kinect sensor to display dynamically inside AutoCAD. This post shows how to do that. A huge thanks to Boris Scheiman for helping me get to this point: he not only extended his nKinect implementation to generate the point cloud data I asked for, he sent a number of emails explaining (and even providing) the various modules needed... Read more →

Initial fooling around with Kinect and AutoCAD

After a completely ridiculous wait of close to 4 months, I finally received my Kinect a few weeks ago. Apart from it being the fastest selling consumer electronics device in history, the delay was also due to the fact I was holding out for the very popular Xbox 360 250Gb Slim bundle (and also because the vendor I chose fumbled the order during the final few weeks, which just added insult to injury). I’d done my homework before receiving the Xbox, and realised that the bundled Kinect would not come with the external power supply needed to connect it... Read more →

Some content from AU 2010

As many of you may now be aware, much of the content recorded at this year’s Autodesk University is now available on the AU website. You’ll find the recording of my AU Virtual session, “Getting to Know the AutoCAD® Plug-ins of the Month”, as well as material from the two physical sessions I presented, “Point Clouds on a Shoestring” and “Integrate F# into Your C# or VB.NET Application for an 8x Performance Boost”. In fact, much to my surprise, the “Point Clouds on a Shoestring” session (which turned out to be my highest-rated session) ended up being recorded, and... Read more →

Back from AU 2010

I was hoping to post during the week from Las Vegas, but it didn’t end up happening. My time just bled away between the various classes I recorded/ presented/co-paneled and the time spent catching up with old friends and making new ones – mainly from among the various people who took the chance to provide greatly appreciated feedback regarding this blog. All in all it was a great week – as it always is – but it wasn’t all smooth sailing: my AU Virtual session on our Plugins of the Month – which I’d struggled to get into Vegas... Read more →

Misusing mutable state with F# Asynchronous Workflows

Or perhaps the title should really be “why it’s really a good idea to avoid misusing mutable state when using F# Asynchronous Workflows”. Ultimately I wanted to share a brief (or not, we’ll see), cautionary tale about the dangers of shared state when implementing concurrent tasks. I’ve been using F# for some time, and have it fairly well drilled into my skull by this point that shared, mutable state is bad. And yet occasionally it somehow creeps in as an expedient way to solve certain issues: perhaps it’s just a lack of discipline on my part or the years... Read more →

AU 2010 Handout: Integrate F# into Your C# or VB.NET Application for an 8x Performance Boost

This handout is for the companion class to the one whose handout formed my last post. While that class was user-focused, this one, “CP322-2 - Integrate F# into Your C# or VB.NET Application for an 8x Performance Boost”, is more developer-focused and takes the hood off the implementation of the BrowsePhotosynth application. The code for this special version of the application – which imports synchronously via C# and synchronously/asynchronously via F# – is available here for download. Introduction This class takes a look at the implementation of BrowsePhotosynth for AutoCAD, the ADN Plugin of the Month from October 2010... Read more →

AU 2010 Handout: Point Clouds on a Shoestring

I’ve been a little slow getting my AU material together, this year (I’ve been called onto more pressing issues fairly consistently over the last weeks/months), so I’m very much up against Monday’s content submission deadline. I’ll certainly have the handouts ready, but the presentations will have to come later. As I’ve done in the past, I like to post my handouts here for people to take a look at (and provide feedback on in time for me to correct prior to the event ;-). Today’s post is the handout for my AutoCAD user-focused class, “AC427-4 - Point Clouds on... Read more →