Reality capture
-
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…
-
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!
-
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…
-
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 –…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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 🙂 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,…
-
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 – although ultimately more useful – 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 – and be processed by – Photofly. The resulting photo scene – once available – would then be used to generate a point cloud back inside the AutoCAD session. So basically a one-click…
-
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. 🙂 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…
-
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 – such as laser – with finger quotes. 🙂 A few weeks ago our friends at FARO sent across a Photon 120 laser scanner to our office in Neuchâtel, 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…