PointCab Plugin for BricsCAD

PointCab

Hi all!

My name is Andreea and I’m the Product Manager for the CAD-Plugins at PointCab – an easy-to-use solution for point cloud processing. We’ve already created plugins for Revit and ArchiCAD that allow the effortless transfer of coordinate measurements and elements to create rough BIM models in a more efficient way.

Since BricsCAD became one of the most used CAD software in the industry we think it’s time for a BricsCAD Plugin as well! For that we need YOUR help:

We like to know and understand your pains and what are you struggling with when working with point clouds in BricsCAD? How could our Plugin be a helpful tool for your workflow? We want to make your life easier, so you can achieve your goals in no time with less effort. Therefore we need your help testing our prototype and your valuable input.

For all your effort you will receive a three-month full PointCab license, including the (still beta-) BricsCAD plugin that you can also use for commercial purposes (worth usually 1140 €).

Not familiar with PointCab yet? We create orthophotos with depth information automatically out of the point cloud, so you don’t need to navigate through the point cloud anymore. Our solution is independent and suitable for all scanners and data formats. This means you can import a large variety of point cloud formats. Of course, you can export DWGs and DXFs compatible with all prevalent CAD software, for further modelling. To learn more, check out our website.

Sounds good to you? Then reply to this post or write us an e-mail at support@pointcab-software.com and we'll get in touch with YOU.

We can't wait to get to know you and find out what ideas you may have!

Yours truly,

The PointCab Team

James Maeding

Hi Pointcab,
I use both acad and bcad, and deal with point clouds from drone and survey scanners. They are on real sate plane coordinates, so x is at least 6,000,000 and Y is 2,000,000 min.
I have tools that build breaklines like top of curb from point clouds, and they need two things to do their job:
1) ability for user to pick point cloud individual points
2) ability to gather points at some distance left and right of a polyline
I don't have anything yet to do item 2, in process of making that.
My current problem is in acad, the snap to 3d point cloud node ability has a major bug. It snaps away from the cursor, so you have to hover away from the point, then it finds the point you want eventually but never by hovering exactly over the point. Its something to do with the large coordinates real civil engineers use.
Then, in bcad, the program takes forever to convert from .laz to its format. However, if you convert to the acad format first (.rcp), the bcad converter goes fast. It must take advatage of the indexing already done.
Now, even when done, bcad does not handle my average point cloud well, say 40 million pts.
So I'm looking for a plug-in for both acad and bcad, which replaces the built in functionality of them because they are not mature yet.
I do not want another outside program to deal with, as that will not have the tools I built to do things with the pt cloud data.
I do not do "pt cloud to buildings or tanks or mechanical stuff", but I do use the data to measure building and tree heights.

Something to mention - point clouds from drone tend to round corners at sharp edges, like curb faces. What I do is draw the horizontal location of the curb edge from ortho photo, then grab the points on the side that is the sidewalk, but starting 3 inches away, and going to 6" away, so I miss the rounded part of the curb.
Then I average that and project to curb edge, and that gives a decent top of curb 3d line. So you can see simply cutting a profile along a pline is not good enough. You need control over what points are used for that due to imperfection with both drone and scanned pt clouds. Also, your 2d traced line will not be perfect, so you don't want points from the curb face getting mixed in with pts on top of curb. This happens all the time at exactly the time you would want to extract a profile - at the edge of a steep and flatish area.
thx

PointCab

Hi James,

thank you very much for your reply to our post.

Actually we were thinking about a plugin from the PointCab software to BricsCad, not about a plugin that makes the connection between AutoCAD and BricsCAD. Our plugins are directly connected with the PointCab standalone software because the point cloud needs to be stored somewhere. The "storage" place will be PointCab.

Now that we have something where the point cloud is stored, we can trigger functions that will allow the transfer of coordinates in real time from the point cloud to the CAD software. This will be done in real time and will allow the "conversion" of these coordinates to 3D objects. That's what we had in mind.

I can think of several solutions for your issue, this can be done in the PointCab standalone solution already. If you are interested, please contact us at support@pointcab-software.com and we can have a chat on this topic.

I am aware that you want to stick only to the CAD software that you are familiar with, but to be honest, I can't come up with a workflow to your issue in AutoCAD or BricsCAD. I am not an expert in these software, that's why I need help to understand better the needs and pains of the BricsCAD users that are working with point clouds.

Best regards
Andreea

James Maeding

Hi Andrea,
I think you are misunderstanding me a bit because you are just starting with bricscad.
What you will find as you get into things, is autocad and bricscad are like clones. Whatever you do in one is likely to work in the other.
Take a look at the brx and .net API's. They are intended to be the same, and are likely what you would use to make bricscad an interface for your data.
I do the exact same thing for my civil engineering data - store outside the dwg, and load up into memory as needed, then display in acad/bcad for editing and drawing things.
I would not recommend storing your data in a dwg.
You don't have to come up with a workflow for me, I already know what I need, but autocad and bricscad have flawed point cloud features currently.
BTW, when researching how to make your tool for bcad, most of the info will be for acad, and it applies to bcad also!
Look up throughtheinterface blog by Kean Walmsley. He shows .net but its close to arx/brx (the C++ apis) and there are many other blogs too.
My problem is I am not a C++ programmer. Otherwise I would use the powerful open source PCL library and be way ahead of the game.