123D Catch, photogrammetry in the cloud

 A netsuke is a tiny sculpture that was invented in 17th-century Japan to serve a practical function: traditional Japanese garments in fact had no pockets so people had to place their belongings in containers (called sagemono) hung by cords from the robes' sashes (obi). Whatever the form of the container, the fastener that secured the cord at the top of the sash was a carved, button-like toggle called a netsuke. A little, funny, ivory netsuke was used as a test shape to carry out some experiments on 123D Catch, the digital photogrammetric software by Autodesk part of 123D suite.

Read more of my experiment and some updates!

BCF Revit plugin has been released.

All over the process, BIM is a matter of interoperability. Several actors, using different software, speaking various languages. Validating digital models can be tricky, even nightmarish. This is the reason why Matteo in his thesis developed a specific plugin designed for Autodesk Revit 2013, taking advantage of the BIM Collaboration Format (BCF) pre release.

Revit models can now be checked in Solibri and re-imported back in Revit with proper red-lining.

Nice and interesting work Matteo!

GreenSpider 2.0 is here...

We are happy to announce that TC Labs just released a free fully functional version of GreenSpider 2.0, the point clouds plugin for Autodesk Revit.

The shiny new GreenSpider v2.0 release is intended to provide access to the complete set of features of GSPoints, GSCurves and the now-embedded GSTranslator. The official clip has been just uploaded to Youtube and Vimeo.

Much more info here!

GreenSpider Translator - The easy way to GreenSpider

Today I released GreenSpider Translator, a little piece of software developed by me as well as Greenspider, my Autodesk Revit 2012 plug-in written to acquire point clouds as native elements.

The Translator can be downloaded here and installed in order to directly convert XYZ vertex files with no normals into the correct file format used by GreenSpider plugin into Autodesk Revit.The installer is written for Windows 7 (.NET framework 4.5), although a WinXP installation was performed successfully too.

The Translator's interface is pretty revealing: GreenSpider 2.0 is already quoted, as it is expected to be released in 2013 with lots of new features for Autodesk Revit 2013. However, this converter was proficiently used on some test cases as documented in this paper, using Revit 2012 and GreenSpider 1.0.2.

The Brave

E’ incredibile come ogni volta che passo dalle parti di Emeryville, una première Pixar mi scappi d’un soffio. Anche quest’anno, infatti, la prima di Brave era fissata 5 giorni dopo la mia partenza per rientrare in Italia. Tuttavia ieri ho avuto modo di porre rimedio alla situazione sul patrio suolo, sebbene io immagini che in inglese Brave possa rendere molto meglio (già l’italica traduzione in “Ribelle”, pur contestualizzata, è discutibile).

Per non rovinare inavvertitamente lo spettacolo a chi deve ancora vedere il film, il taglio che ho voluto dare a queste mie personalissime note è dunque un po’ tecnico. Non scriverò però di stereoscopia sebbene io sia stato costretto dalla programmazione e dal cinema scelto alla versione 3D, per fortuna non esageratamente collimata tanto da essere a tratti gradevole e mai fastidiosa.