Point clouds
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In this previous post I showed some code which uploads photos to Photofly and pulls down and imports the resultant point cloud into AutoCAD 2011. The application relies on a special executable from the Photofly team which was built from code extracted from Photo Scene Editor that uploads photos to Photofly and asks for them to be stitched together into a scene on the server. While we're working to tidy this little executable up for publishing, I realised that a good portion of the application could be used as it stands: rather than uploading the photos directly from AutoCAD to…
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I've been looking at (and talking about) point clouds a lot, of late, especially those generated from sets of 2D photos. Today's announcement by Scott Sheppard refers to a new technology on Autodesk Labs that makes it even easier to work with and model using point clouds, Shape Extraction for AutoCAD 2011. I spent some time evaluating this technology, to see how it works with point clouds extracted from Photosynth, to make sure it proved useful. I used Photosynth because of the wealth of community content browsable online: Photofly content is not shared in the same way, but I would…
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During my recent stay in the Bay Area, Stephen suggested I join the San Rafael-based DevTech team to record another ADN DevCast. Our hope was to cut down the length somewhat by focusing on a single topic, but those plans pretty much went out the window as soon as I started talking. :-S π Thanks to Stephen, Gopi and Fenton for their warm welcome in San Rafael, and for keeping the session interesting with all their questions! [We experienced a few technical glitches due to my system getting very close to its end-of-life (it only has a 90 GB hard-drive,…
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After I'd had such fun working out how to bring point clouds from Microsoft's Photosynth into AutoCAD, I was delighted when the Autodesk Labs team came to me with the suggestion of a comparable β although ultimately more useful β integration with the then-soon-to-be-released Project Photofly. The concept was simple: provide AutoCAD users with a command allowing them to select a folder of images to upload to β and be processed by β Photofly. The resulting photo scene β once available β would then be used to generate a point cloud back inside the AutoCAD session. So basically a one-click…
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I am really very excited about this technology. For those of you who've found my investigations into Photosynth and computer vision/photogrammetry solutions to be of interest, you're in for a treat. π As Scott Sheppard has announced over on his blog, Photo Scene Editor has just gone live on Autodesk Labs: a very interesting application, in itself, but also the first public client of the Photofly web service (see this previous post for some mention of other "*fly" technologies coming from Autodesk). Photo Scene Editor allows you to build, visualize, edit and analyse "scenes" from sets of photographs. The tool…
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I've had quite a lot of contact with "laser" technology over the last few weeks. (In case you're wondering about the quotation marks, that's just a little nod to Mike Myers' fantastic Dr. Evil character, who in the Austin Powers movies refers to now-commonplace terms β such as laser β with finger quotes. π A few weeks ago our friends at FARO sent across a Photon 120 laser scanner to our office in NeuchΓ’tel, and we've just started getting to grips with it (if you want to see more advanced use of this technology, be sure to check out this…
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Once again, members of the DevTech Americas team have put together an entertaining and informative DevCast session on AutoCAD's APIs. This time, Gopinath Taget joins Stephen Preston and Fenton Webb to present a number of interesting topics: boundary tracing, associative surfaces, 3D laser scanning and point cloud filtering. I'll be covering boundary tracing via this blog in the coming weeks, just as I expect to be doing more with point clouds (coincidentally a laser scanner from FARO β similar to the one Fenton and Gonzalo use in this DevCast β should be arriving for me today, so watch this space…
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While on my way to San Francisco, last weekend, I had a 7-hour layover in Washington D.C. Given the amount of time available to me I decided to head from Dulles into the centre of the city and do something fun: I ended up choosing to visit the Natural History Museum at The Smithsonian, which proved to be really interesting even to my somewhat bleary eyes. Part of my motivation was to try to capture something for bringing into Photosynth (as I'd borrowed my wife's digital SLR for taking some snaps at the wedding I was attending in Las Vegas).…
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I've submitted three sessions for this year's Autodesk University: Getting to know AutoCAD's Plugins of the Month (a 60-minute virtual class, session ID 1681) Synopsis: The Autodesk Developer Network (ADN) team has been publishing "Plugins of the Month" on Autodesk Labs for over a year. Each of these plugins extends an Autodesk products in a useful or interesting way, and is provided with full source code! Attend this session for an introduction to the various AutoCAD plugins that have been published (with a brief mention of those published for other products). We will take a detailed look at the source…
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In the previous posts in this series we introduced a command that downloaded and imported point clouds from Photosynth.net, we introduced a WinForms user interface on top of it and then replaced that UI with one implemented using WPF. As threatened last time, we're now going to make some efficiency improvements in the original command implementation. In our previous implementation we were blindly asking for files, one after the other, and using failure to indicate when we'd reached the end. Which was fine, but it limited us in a few ways: we could not reliably parallelize this otherwise highly parallelizable…