Point clouds
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As with the previous contest, the winner stands to win a tricked out iPad plus a signed (by Carl Bass, Autodesk's CEO) copy of 3ds Max or 3ds Max Design. See Scott's blog for details. The deadline for this competition is Guy Fawkes Night, November 5th. Apparently the iPad is one of a kind, but as this is the second such competition, I have my doubts. 😉 Oh, and yes, only inhabitants of USA and Canada are eligible to win these prizes, quite sadly, but that shouldn't stop people from entering for the fun and prestige.
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I just thought I'd report back on a few changes made to the BrowsePhotosynth Plugin of the Month during the course of this week. The updated version has just been announced on Scott Sheppard's blog and I thought I'd share some of the specific implementation details. The first one (in the 1.0.1 update) was a really interesting problem and I owe a big thanks both to Alberto Venturini for reporting it and to Marat Mirgaleev, from our DevTech team in Moscow, for helping test on a comparable OS. The problem was that on all the systems upon which Alberto had…
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Just back from a great little break: yesterday we drove across and spent the day at the Swiss Museum of Transport in Luzern (more on that in a bit), before having dinner at the Rathaus Brauerie opposite the Kapellbrucke. Then we spent the night at the Hotel Bellevue, a very friendly hotel near the edge of Lake Luzern, and today headed across to Ballenberg – with its amazing historical view of Swiss life – before arriving home this evening. All in all a great deal of fun crammed into two short days. One of the highlights for me was a…
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In this previous post I attempted to capture the geometry of a monument close to my home with approximately 500 photographs imported into Photosynth (and October's Plugin of Month to bring it into AutoCAD, of course :-). As promised in that post, I managed to find time this weekend to go back down with a FARO Photon 120 laser scanner (which I'd mentioned in this previous post) to capture the same monument using a different technology: a 3D laser scanner. The first thing to note was there was a lot more to carry: …
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Many of you will have seen previous incarnations of this tool, during its development. It's a little more complex than most of our other monthly plugins – mostly as it depends on a couple of external components – but the functionality should hopefully be simple enough to understand and use. I won't go into great details here, but if you're using AutoCAD 2011, give it a try by downloading the ZIP from the Autodesk Labs Plugin of the Month site and executing the contained installer package. From there you should be able to run the BROWSEPS command inside AutoCAD to…
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As part of my preparation for a class I'm presenting at AU, Point Clouds on a Shoestring (AC427-4), I bought myself a new toy a couple of weeks ago: an Eye-Fi Pro X2 memory card. This very cool little device is much more than a high capacity SD card: it has an in-built Wi-Fi chip that allows it to connect to your local Wi-Fi infrastructure (whether via a wireless router, access points or an ad-hoc connection to your PC) and will automatically upload the images you're taking to a folder on your system and (optionally) to your favourite photo sharing…
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I've talked about the Photo Scene Editor tool a few times (on this blog and in a DevCast), so hopefully you're already familiar with the capabilities of this fun product. This is really just to let you know that the Autodesk Labs team is running a competition that ends in a couple of weeks, on September 24th. Give it a try, and have the chance to win a signed (by Autodesk CEO, Carl Bass) copy of 3ds Max or 3ds Max Design plus a 64GB iPad!
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The class catalogs for AU 2010 – for both the physical and virtual classes – have now been posted to the AU website: I have a few AU classes scheduled – thanks to any of you who took the time to vote for them. My first class is virtual… Getting to Know the AutoCAD® Plugins of the Month (CP212-1V) Tuesday November 30th, 6:00-7:00 am PST Tuesday November 30th, 11:00 am-12:00 pm PST The Autodesk Developer Network (ADN) team has been publishing "Plug-ins of the Month" on Autodesk Labs for over a year. Each of these plug-ins extends an Autodesk® product…
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A couple of weekends ago, shortly after returning from our trip to the States, I walked down to the area of Lake Neuchâtel that's nearest our house, called La Tène (which is now also the name of our local commune (or municipality), which was recently created as a result of fusing Marin-Epagnier with Thielle-Wavre… thankfully they didn't call it Marin-Epagnier-Thielle-Wavre ;-). On the way I stopped off to take a few photos of a local monument. La Tène culture is apparently quite famous in archeological circles, and the monument itself is pretty cool. It's a replica of an Iron Age…
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Some of you may have seen the point cloud tool for 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design posted on Autodesk Labs. This plugin currently works with points defined in an ASCII format, although I expect in time it will support similar formats to those supported by AutoCAD. In case you're interested in bringing point cloud files that intended for – or generated/edited by – this tool into AutoCAD, I thought I'd share a quick tip. You can use the TXT2LAS tool – which I've used extensively in my efforts to bring point clouds into AutoCAD from Photosynth and Photofly –…