Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Point Cloud Feature Extraction

When I first saw this show up in the Labs blog post it was called "Scan to Bim". I wondered about the name conflict with the application already using that name, created by the folks at IMAGINiT. I thought at first maybe that Autodesk bought it. However barely a day later and it's called Point Cloud Feature Extraction.

    [Added 1/26/2012: There are reports that some users experiencing difficulty getting this plug-in to work. Check out the follow up post at It is Alive in the Lab to see what's happening. One tester believes it is related to deployment vs. individual installations.]

    [Added 1/27/2012: If you can't get it running, the latest development: "A user in the discussion forum installed a newer Visual Studio runtime and resolved the issue in his case." TRY NEWER RUNTIME ]

WHAT TOOLS DOES POINT CLOUD FEATURE EXTRACTION PLUG-IN FOR REVIT PROVIDE?

Point Cloud Feature Extraction for Autodesk Revit 2012 provides the following tools to facilitate the point cloud editing after it is inserted into Revit:

    Crop/Uncrop: Temporarily hide the points outside a rectangle or polygon Hide Point Cloud: Temporarily hide the whole point cloud object to facilitate the inspection of the feature extraction result Adjust Axis: Transform the point cloud data so that floor can be aligned with XY plane and major walls are parallel to Z axis

Moreover, this plug-in includes some main features specifically for Revit so that the extracted features / geometry can be smoothly integrated into the BIM workflow:

    Datum Extraction: Extract both level and orthogonal grid Site Extraction: Extract both terrain surface for ground surface creation and building footprint on terrain surface for building pad generation Wall Extraction: Extract both straight wall layout and arc wall Floor Extraction: Extract floor from selected points on the floor plan level

AVAILABILITY

The Point Cloud Feature Extraction for Autodesk Revit technology preview is licensed for a limited term and for a particular territory as referenced in the End User License Agreement. The technology preview will operate until August 1, 2012.

Want to watch some videos? (links to You Tube)


They'd like your feedback

See how well the Point Cloud Feature Extraction for Autodesk Revit technology preview works for you, and be sure to tell us how we can improve this technology by following the feedback links in the upper-right corner of this page. You can also post comments on the Between the Lines or It's Alive in the Lab blog.



1 comment:

Aaron Maller said...

So far we can only get it to work on two machines... The ones that were NOT installed By Deployment. Any machine installed By Deployment, it just fails to run.