Through the Interface

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 →

A summary of news from Forge DevCon 2017

For those of you who – like me – weren’t able to travel to Las Vegas for this year’s Forge DevCon, I thought I’d do a quick round-up of the major news that I could extract over the wire. I’m sure there will be further blog posts from the Forge team summarising more of things I couldn’t see – not being there in person – but this will hopefully be of some use to people, at least. To kick things off, I suggest reading this blog post. It talks about some high-level items, such as additions to the platform,... Read more →

AEC Hackathon is coming to Munich (and so am I)

I’ve been interested in participating in – or at least attending – an AEC Hackathon for a couple of years now. I was first introduced to them during the VR Hackathons I attended in SF in 2014 and 2015 (Damon, Greg and Paul, who help organize the AEC Hackathons, were also organizing/involved in/attending the VR ones). There are a number of AEC Hackathons planned for Europe over the coming months, so I’m happy to say I’ll finally get my chance. I’ve been asked to present at the first – which is in Munich from March 31st – April 2nd... Read more →

Autodesk Memento now available for Mac

My favourite mesh generation and manipulation tool, Autodesk Memento, is now available (in Beta) for the Mac. I’ve been part of the Alpha programme for the OS X version for some time: admittedly not very actively, but I did install a number of builds and report an error or two. I’m very happy to see the Mac version is now joining its Windows sibling in Beta. Both versions can be downloaded and installed from this page. The model shown at the top of the page is of coral – I downloaded it from the bottom of the Memento download... 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 →

Flying again

So yes, I’m back flying again. I’m not travelling anywhere, though. Some of you will remember my abortive attempts at UAV piloting from around a year ago. My Quanum Nova has been gathering dust, since then (it’s also in pieces because I tried – so far unsuccessfully – to install a Bluetooth telemetry module). But I’m motivated to get back on that particular horse thanks to a discovery I made a week ago. On a whim, I bought a micro-drone called the Hubsan X4 H107C. This is an incredible little device: you can pick one up for around $50... Read more →

New versions of Autodesk’s Reality Computing products

A couple of updates from our Reality Solutions team… Firstly, a new, expanded portfolio of ReCap products is now available for download. They include the newly branded ReCap 360 Ultimate – previously known as ReCap Pro. For more information head on over to this blog post. Secondly, Autodesk Memento has been updated to version 1.0.15.10. Here’s what’s new in this release: Live update mechanism to deliver minor updates in the future Extrude a boundary Surface Sculpt Smart selection to select planar & organic surfaces with strokes Photo validator to check for photos that will not stitch Ability to toggle... 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 →

Titanic exhibition: that sinking feeling

Some friends from the UK were visiting Switzerland (although not staying with us) over the weekend, so we decided to meet them for dinner on Sunday at Geneva airport before their flight home. Thankfully I’d flown in from Las Vegas (and then Heathrow) to Zurich, the day before, otherwise visiting the same airport twice in one weekend would have seemed very weird. My wife suggested we go a little early (despite me being Vegas-lagged) and visit an exhibition she’d heard about at Palexpo (which is right at Geneva airport, and is also where the Geneva Motor Show takes place).... 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 →

123D Catch available for Android

I was very happy to read the news on Shaan’s blog: 123D Catch is now available on Android. I blogged about its availability via the web and on iOS, a couple of years ago, but there’s now an Android version and it’s pretty slick. Some quick background info: I do my best to stay OS agnostic, as a rule. My primary desktop OS is Windows (7 or 8.1, depending) but I also use OS X Mavericks and play with a few different Linux distributions when I get time. I have an old iPad 2 that has a cracked –... 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 →