AutoCAD
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I'm a bit late announcing this, but as I'm due to submit my own proposals for Autodesk University 2011 by the May 6th deadline, I thought I'd post a quick note to remind readers of the fast-closing window of opportunity to submit your own proposals to speak at this year's AU. I'm definitely submitting a session showing how to integrate AutoCAD with Kinect (please don't go stealing my idea, now ;-), and I'm chewing on another topic, which may prove to be "choosing the right programming language for working with AutoCAD". I'm still open to delivering additional sessions, in case…
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Now things are getting interesting. ๐ 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 to…
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After a longer-than-anticipated break, Stephen and Fenton are back with an all-new ADN DevCast. This one focuses on developing applications to work with AutoCAD for Mac. They've managed to keep the timing of the DevCast down to 20 minutes, so we're trying just posting this online (rather than having a separate download for offline viewing). Do post a comment if that doesn't work well for you.
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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 to…
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This question came in a few weeks ago, which I thought worth addressing: Hi, Kean! I have a question - how can we create hatch during jig? The code in this post endeavours to do just that, but โ be warned โ isn't fully successful. The problem I chose to interpret this as is "how do you jig the creation of a polyline, using it as the boundary for an associative hatch?", and it's not an easy one to solve. I started by taking Philippe Leefsma's code from this previous post, which jigs a polyline (including arc segments). I switched…
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After many years of absence from the platform, AutoCAD is returning to MS-DOS. This is great news for our DOS-based user community, who have been struggling along with R13 for the last decade and a half. Enabled by the application re-architecture performed for AutoCAD for Mac (codenamed "Sledgehammer"), the new AutoCAD for DOS (codenamed "Screwdriver") will deliver compelling performance with a streamlined user interface experience. AutoCAD for DOS will automatically import any CUI-based customizations, replacing ribbons and other Windows-centric UI elements with equivalent pull-down, screen and icon menus. For those of you wanting to hook up a digitizing tablet to…
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We've been looking a lot at transient graphics, recently. The standard approach we've been using to displaying graphics in all viewports has been to pass in an empty IntegerCollection into the various transient graphics-related methods, rather than listing the viewports specifically in which we want to display the graphics. Thorsten Meinecke made the very valid point that this doesn't always work as you'd like, particularly when you have multiple floating paperspace viewport. Now I fully admit I'm not a big user of viewports, as far as it goes, so I sometimes forget to cater for scenarios that are probably extremely…
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Since starting to use the transient graphics API in AutoCAD 2009, I've believed that any DBPoints you display would not respect PDMODE (the AutoCAD system variable allowing the user to control how points are displayed). A recent internal discussion was on this very subject, and one of our engineering team, Longchao Jiang, interjected with a comment explaining that only points on the DEFPOINTS layer get displayed without PDMODE being applied. This was quite a revelation for me: DBPoints apparently get created on DEFPOINTS by default and simply changing them to layer 0 (say) would cause them to respect PDMODE when…
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Thanks for Balaji Ramamoorthy โ who recently joined our team in India โ and Adam Nagy for helping generate the code for this post. There are lots of reasons people might want to tessellate a 3D solid in AutoCAD to generate a mesh. The code in today's post uses the Boundary Representation (Brep) API in AutoCAD to do just that, generating a set of 3D faces. A few points about the implementation: I've only made a small number of settings to control the mesh generation: more are available for you to experiment with. It should be simple enough to generate…
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As you may have seen โ including over at Shaan's blog โ the 2012 family of our products has now been announced. Stephen Preston, our DevTech Americas Manager, has recorded a DevTV session on the new APIs in AutoCAD 2012. This material was presented during our recent Developer Days tour, attended by ADN members around the world. AutoCAD 2012 โ New APIs View Download (17.2MB) Samples (133KB) Highlights & topics covered: Migration steps New APIs Associative Array API Multi-mode Grip API ResetTimes VisibilityOverrule BlockTableRecord.SetIsFromOverlayReference acdbConvertAcDbCurveToGelibCurve acdbConvertGelibCurveToAcDbCurve acdbAssignGelibCurveToAcDbCurve Autoloader Simplified plugin deployment AutoCAD for Mac I'll definitely be following up with…