Capturing the Reality of Your Facility

STEVE OLSON: My laptop all of a sudden decided to install updates like, three seconds-- three minutes before my presentation started. All of a sudden, boom, restarting. So--

AUDIENCE: OK. No problem. Thank you.

STEVE OLSON: Thank you. All right. All right, so we-- I can at least kind of get through a few just, things that I don't need slides for or a computer for while this thing decides to do its updates. So my name is Steve Olson. My title or my role-- what I do on a daily basis-- is, I'm the Manager of Training Services for Mesa. Mesa is a CAD service and training provider and an Autodesk reseller. We're based out of Pittsburgh. We cover, like, western PA, Ohio, and to New York, and stuff like that. So that's kind of where we're at.

My background is, I've been using Inventor and Autodesk products going all the way back to probably about 15 years. Before I joined Mesa nine years ago, I was-- I worked as a draftsman and vault administrator for a pop up trailer manufacturer. If you've ever seen the little ones where the roof comes up the beds slide out, it's kind of fabric all around. That's what I did for five years. About two to three years of that was using Inventor. And I kind of just took over the vault because I was the one that learned it the quickest. So the guy learns it the quickest gets all the questions and has to do all the stuff. That's kind of what happened to me.

So to kind of give you a little bit of a background on this class, it is not a blue screen with a swirly thing. There we go. Now I get to log in. So I can probably chit chat enough here to kind of-- while this comes up. OK, so to kind of give you a background of this class-- so this is capturing the reality of your facility. I kind of got into ReCap fairly early after it got released. I kind of thought it was an interesting product.

One of our customers had a real specific need to incorporate it in their survey stuff. So I kind of just got thrust into learning ReCap. And I thought it was a pretty cool product. And so I really didn't know much about the factory design utilities. But-- so I didn't know much about them. But I'd kind of been using ReCap. And then I saw a-- kind of somebody's workflow that they kind of took ReCap into this other app that they could trace geometry over and stuff like that.

And I was like, that's pretty decent. But once I started learning how factory design worked, Factory Design Suite worked with ReCap, it's like, this is so easy. And what's kind of ironic about it, is like I said, I worked at a pop up manufacturer for like, five years. We had drawings of the facility. But that was never a priority for anybody. It was always, keep the factory floor going. Do the ECOs. Do the draw. So you're basically kind of never doing the drawings of the floor or maintaining that unless something's coming up.

And so that's kind of what-- that's kind of like-- why I always thought it was kind of an important thing to do. Or kind of keep, you know, it's a task that nobody wants to do. They don't deal with it very often. And it can be difficult, because you have to go out and get measurements and stuff like that. But if you use ReCap and the factory design utilities, like, it can be super easy. So let me-- I want to just get--

AUDIENCE: Are you calling it ReCap [INAUDIBLE]?

STEVE OLSON: What?

AUDIENCE: R-E-C-A-P?

STEVE OLSON: Yeah, ReCap. It stands for-- it's short for Reality Capture, that's the name of the product. So real quickly here, let's kind of just get a pulse of the group here. So, anybody using ReCap right now? OK. Anybody using the Factory Design Utilities? OK, a couple. So, good. So some of this will probably new for folks.

I don't know if you saw, but recently they kind of changed ReCap around a little bit. It's now been kind of meshed in with what was Momento, then became ReMake. It's kind of all now one product. You used to do your-- like, if you do-- it has two workflows in it. You have photos to a point cloud or mesh, or scans to a cloud or a mesh. This is going to this class is going to focus on the scan aspect of it. Now that everything seems to have been rebooted, let me get myself back on track.

So that's what the class is. I kind of already gone over where the inspiration was, that I thought it was a really good workflow, I think it can be helpful. I think it will save anybody that has to document facilities, if it's your own manufacturing facility like I was faced with, or if you're doing this as a service for somebody, that can really shortcut your workflow.

So basically there's several different portions of this. ReCap is one of them, and I want to help you to understand how to go from raw scan data into a point cloud into ReCap. I also want to help you understand there's different utilities in Inventor and in AutoCAD that help you get geometry of those. I honestly like AutoCAD's better than Inventor's, and I'll go over why that is when I get into those products. Also I want to talk about how the three things kind of fit together.

And one thing that I'm going to talk about, I want to mention here while I'm saying the workflow between them, I say AutoCAD, or AutoCAD Architecture, the Factory Design Utilities focus on AutoCAD Architecture because they that's where you get your walls and your doors, all your architectural elements come out of that. Some of the point cloud geometry extracting that, those tools are available in almost every version of AutoCAD. Everything I've read is like, AutoCAD Light doesn't have them, I don't have Light on my machine to verify that, but everything I've read says these tools are in pretty much every AutoCAD vertical except for Light.

We're going to talk about Factory Assets a little bit. We're going to place those in Inventor. I'm going to talk about what those are and how those go into the product. And when I say, an asset, I'm talking about the actual equipment of a facility. You know, lathes and drill presses and tables, anything that's an asset of the company, how that can get placed and how you can create your own.

One thing before I dive too deeply into this, one of my philosophies about an AU class is I should be able give you everything you would need to recreate this at home. So you can play-- I guess you can play the home version of AU. So you have, obviously, the slides. You obviously have the handout. I have also created an extra resources folder that has all the scan data that I use, and then also I've recorded videos.

I'm going to show you these videos. I would like to do this live, I prefer live demos than recorded stuff, because I think it keeps you guys more entertained. Unfortunately this workflow-- just there's too many steps in there that take five minutes, 10 minutes to do. So I felt like I kind of have to do it through videos. So I apologize for that. Believe me, I would love to do this live for you, I just don't have a beefy enough laptop or the time needed.

So let me explain the overall workflow and then I'll dive deep into each individual one. So the workflow is, ReCap, Inventor, AutoCAD Architecture are all going to combine to basically give you a 3D model of a facility. ReCap is where we're going to get scanned data, and it's going to make a point cloud, which everybody understands what a point cloud is? It's just basically a bunch of points sitting out in space. I always love the fact it's called a cloud, because basically clouds in the sky are clusters of water droplets that look like a solid entity. Basically that's what point cloud is, it's just a bunch of dots that are clustered enough together that look solid.

So ReCap is going to be where we bring our scan data in. Inventor is going to be where we drop our assets in. And then AutoCAD, again we can put in assets. There's going to be stock ones available, and then also we're going to be able to create our own. AutoCAD Architecture is where we're going to get our architectural elements, our doors, our walls, our columns, that type of stuff. So that's where I rely on that.

Realistically, the assets can be placed in AutoCAD if you feel more comfortable doing that, but for me, I kind of I'm kind of in Inventor guy. I'd say of all my experience, Inventor is the vast majority of my experience, so I feel comfortable in that product more so than AutoCAD, and that's why I kind of lean that way. But the placing of assets is identical-- I can't say identical, but can be done in either application. And again, in Architecture, we can add the walls, doors, and windows.

So let's focus on ReCap Pro. So the role for that is, we can take our actual raw scan data and bring that in and make a point cloud. Now there's a couple things I can do while I'm in ReCap that can be to my benefit. One of those is I can reset the origin of the point cloud. In the scan data that I use, my origin when I first bring it in is the scan location of the very first scan that gets imported, which is five feet off the ground in the middle of the facility. To me, I like stuff on corners. On the floor, in the corner, because that's where my brain thinks of zero, zero, zero. So I can reset the origin there as well.

And then also I can create these regions or classifications. So basically they kind of work like an AutoCAD layer where I can put a bunch of points on a particular region, and then I can control the visibility of those. That becomes valuable downstream in Inventor and AutoCAD, because let's say I don't want to see the roof. I want to get rid of the roof so I can see down into the building. I can put all the ceiling or roof points in one region and just turn it off.

Also, because the nature of scan data, you sometimes get unwanted or unneeded points. You can delete those if you want to. I'm a little bit of a spaz, I have a tendency to not want to delete those, just because I'm a little bit nervous I might need them at some point. So I have a tendency just to put them in a region and hide them. But be aware, you can just select them and hit Delete and they're gone, and that might make things easier for you. So just make your own decision. Like I'm saying, I have a tendency to be a little bit of a worrier, or a spaz, and I kind of try to hold on to that stuff.

So let me get into my first video here. I'll try to demonstrate-- what am I doing-- to narrate here. Again, you will have all these videos available to you. I actually have them narrated, but I don't want to listen to myself, and I don't want you to have to listen to me talking to myself. So I'm going to have the sound muted while we're bringing it.

So this is ReCap itself, ReCap Pro. We're going to bring in some scan data. I'm going to say I want to get a new project. And when I get to that dialog box it's going to say, well, do you want to do a scan project, a photo project, or are you going to upload something that you did on a device? And I'm going to say, I want to bring in scan data. So again, just real quickly here, I'm focusing on-- I've already done the scan. I want to pick-- I'm not going to worry about trying to get you guys how to do scans. I've already got the scans, I've got them downloaded. I thought I paused you. Let me just back up here a second.

So I'm starting from that aspect. That's where this workflow is going to start. So I'm basically creating a project. I'm giving it a name, I'm going to save it somewhere on my system. I'm basically in my Inventor project creating a folder, that way it's all with my other data. I'm going to call this Facility Scan, and pick that folder, and then I'll accept that. And so now, I basically can either select files to import-- my favorite is to just drag and drop it on the bullseye. So what I'll do here is, I'll open up another window, kind of pull it over from the other screen, find that scan data.

Again, this raw scan data, this is actually one of the very first examples Autodesk provided for ReCap, whenever they first introduced it. So I just kind of grabbed theirs. It is probably the best data I've found. I've got 16 different scanned locations in the video, here I only pick a handful, just because to make things a little bit smoother, and a little bit easier. Because realistically, I think one of the last times I did the entire thing, it took about an hour for it to bring it all in and put it all together, and I just didn't want to have to sit there for an hour while my machine processed that when I was recording.

So I've got six different scans. And so it basically, here is asking for some-- you know, do I want to do range clipping, intensity. I kind of just typically keep defaults for the most part. So I'm going to then bring it in. You can see it's going to load each of those, and then down there on the bottom right hand corner, it's saying, do I want to auto-register the scans? And that's what I typically do. Auto-registering is, the software is going to figure out how scan one and scan two fit together for me.

You'll see in this data set, and I actually picked the six that I picked intentionally, because the first four are bang, bang, bang. They're right next to each other. The last two, there's a wall between their scan locations and the first four. So it's not going to know how to put them together. But I'll show you here, and again I did that intentionally, because I want to show you here how, if it doesn't figure it out, how to put them together.

So you can see here it's loading them all, it's kind of just processing it. It'll tell you how much time has passed and how much time it thinks it's going to take to do this. But basically, your part of this process is very minimal. You're just bringing it in, giving a name, telling it to auto-register. You can manually register, but what registering is, is you're going to pick three points, three common points in each scan group, so it understands how to put them together. And I'll talk a little bit more about that when my video gets to that point. But you can see here it's just loading, taking its sweet old time.

I'm sure I'm probably talking about what it's doing there in the videos there. Fast forwarded time warp there to where it's done. Now it's going to start trying to match. And that whole process there was just loading them. Now it's going to try to start matching them up. You'll see they're at the top, it says zero of six scans matched, zero groups created. In a second the video will time warp again, and I'll be to the point where I have all six scans processed, but I'll have two groups. So let's just give it a second here, and I don't think there's much video time in between that. I guess the recorded version of me was being a little bit more talkative than the live version of me, so give it a second here.

You can see here, just real quickly, I could just skip this process and do it manually. Here's the message I'm talking about though, it's going to say you've got-- let me just pause it real quick there-- it says, six scans processed, two groups created, zero groups remaining. So what happens, you can see over here, this is group one. You can see the four scans that are part of that one. And then over here, I've got the other two scans, they're kind of hiding behind that box. But what's kind of cool about this is I've got a 2D view and a 3D view.

So I'm going to, in a second here, begin picking common points between the two scans. And one of the things that Autodesk told me pretty early on is the fact that you don't have to have the exact point. This is kind of like horseshoes, where you're close enough, it is going to work. It's going to be able interpolate that selection. Also they recommend picking on three separate planes. And that makes sense, it kind of helps it fit together a little bit better.

What I also think is helpful to understand is, down here in the bottom of the group that isn't matched in or merged in, it's still trying to figure something out there. Once you've gotten to the point where you've picked them all in it will bring that whole group together. It's treating this as one entity. One thing that I didn't realize first was, I thought that was two that it didn't figure out. It actually put those two together and is now waiting for me to say, here's how these two fit in with everything else.

So here I'm going, kind of looking around. I'm going to pick out three common points. And here you can see here, that wall that I'm looking at right here, this is the wall that divides the two places where they're at. So this door frame that's in that hallway, I can see from both scans. So I'm going to try to get as close as I possibly can, but I don't have to get dead on.

You can also see how they're color coded. Those were green, now it's moved on to a blue dot. And there's a poster at the end of a hallway here that you can see from both scan groups. So I'm going to try to pick up one of the corners of that poster. So there's that one. You can see now it's blue, before there were green dots. So if you get one you don't like, you can hover over it, it will let you delete it. But I'm picking out those three, the common points. You can see there was that X that I was talking about, I can get rid of it.

My third point that I pick up is, there's a little safety stripe in the doorway. I hit the one corner of the black stripe, because I can find them. And again, trying to find three separate planes, three common points. And this one is a little bit harder to see, but it should work. There it goes. So again, it was green, blue and red were the dots. You can see over here.

Now it found the match. And I can say, merge the scan, and it will then bring that all together. And I also like how-- it was a little too late there-- but there was a little report here that we can look at, once it's done, that'll give us a report on how close of a match it was. You can see here, if I pause that really quick, I can maybe zoom in. So here is a little report saying how much overlap, what's the balance between the two, and how many points are within 6 millimeters of each other.

And I like this, because this scan set comes out that everything is beyond, is above, 99%, within six millimeters of each other, which that gives me pretty good confidence that I've got what I want. So basically, after that I basically tell it to index the scans, and then it will end up building my model for me. So there I'm telling it-- and again, there's a lot of waiting here. This is one of the reasons why this is all a video, because in this process here, it probably takes about 30 minutes for this data set on my machine, which my machine is about three years old, so maybe it's not as heavy computing power as anything else.

So once I get to the point I can tell it to launch, it's still loading these, still kind of processing it. You can see down here, I'm actually able to look at it before it's completely done. It's still about 38%, 39%. What I'll do here, you'll see in the video is I'll pause it until it's completely done. But it's still kind of loading, I can get an idea of the way that point cloud looks while it's processing.

All right. So now we're into a second video segment. What you're going to see in this one is, you see how this grid is kind of cutting through the point cloud right there? That's telling me where the origin is. And if I remember correctly, it's also running at a 45 degree angle. So obviously I could leave it like that if that's what I'm OK with. Again, I'm a little bit OCD, I like to see that squared up. It also gives me the ability to show you how you can reset the origin.

So there is where that scan head is, definitely about four or five feet off the ground. And I want to put the origin, let's say, on one of these corners right here. So underneath this file command, I can use this Update Origin. What's kind of important to recognize here is, the software is going to walk you through what to do to reset the origin. And it says, click to update the location of the origin. Please press Enter to confirm, Tab to update the orientation of the coordinate system.

So I'm going to end up picking up the corner that I want. Zoom in there, pick up the corner I'm looking for, and then I end up hitting Tab, because again, it kind of runs at an odd angle through the system. So I'll then hit Tab, it'll give me the z, the x and the y. Sometimes I try to play with the z. It looks like it's running straight up and down good enough for me. So I have a tendency to leave that, when I do this data set.

And then, now it's-- what?

AUDIENCE: Looks good enough.

STEVE OLSON: Yeah. Well, it's just--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

STEVE OLSON: Well, it just depends. Like in this one here, I'm just like, eh, it looks like it's good enough. But that's up to everybody's judgment, honestly. I probably could, or probably should have, if this was something, a real project, I'd probably go through the point of trying to do that. For this demonstration I'm like, eh, you know, that works.

But what I found interesting about picking these points is, it's now asking me to pick the x. Notice how it doesn't pick an individual point, it's actually interpolating a plane that the x is running normal to. So that was kind of an oddball, it took a little bit of an adjustment. It's a little bit counter-intuitive if you ask me. But you can see here, I'm now looking at the top of it. It looked like it fit good enough again, and we'll use that term, good enough. And then I hit OK, and now it's updated that. So now that's the origin of my model.

One thing that I'll state here real quick before I go on about the origin. When I bring this into AutoCAD or Inventor, I can still locate this in space where I want it to be. It's not locking in. One of the things I found, though, and so one of the last things I'll show, ReCap has is really cool workflow where I can connect this point cloud project to in Navisworks design. And I can see the scan, the raw scan data, which is essentially a picture more or less, and the 3D model overlaid over each other.

The one thing I-- the first time I tried that though, I wasn't thinking about where my origins were, and I was using one that I had tweaked the origin in Inventor or AutoCAD, so they didn't line up. I was like, oh, probably need to make sure they're lined up in ReCap. So that's the one thing. If you're going to go to that step, definitely try to think about that. If you're like, I can relocate this in Inventor myself, you don't necessarily need to worry about doing this step. But if you're going connect ReCap to Navisworks, you want to make sure that everything downstream has the same origin.

So the next step, like I talked about in the workflow, is I'm going to create regions here that are going to classify these points into essentially groups that makes sense to me, like the ceiling, unwanted points. So I have a bunch of selection tools at the bottom. There's a window selection, there's a fence selection. So basically how this will work is, you'll basically pick the points that you want to put into a region. You can see I've got a bunch of random things here. And even in this design I'm really worried about things from-- I'm really worried from about here over. This way I really don't care about. So I'm just going to draw a big selection window.

Once I have them selected I can say I'm going to put them in a region. And I want to make a new region because I don't really have any right now. And then it will say, name that region. I'll call it unwanted. This is where I could easily just hit Delete, and they're gone. So it's just up to you how you want to handle that. There is a lot of data there, so if I know for a fact that I'm not going to use it, I probably should get in the habit of deleting them. But like I said, I get a little bit nervous that I might need that at some point. So here-- let me pause that real quick.

So over there on that menu-- step it back just a second-- you can see there's these little eyeballs. These will let me turn the visibility off or on of that region. And so I accidentally turned off the unassigned points and not the unwanted points. So now I'm going to add-- I found another stray point and I added it to the unwanted group. And so now I'm going to get the ceiling. Again, it's just a matter of selecting them. And then you would basically tell it, you want to put it in a group, or you will need to make a new group.

And one thing about groups is, a point can only be in one group. I can't put it in multiple. That's one of the things I learned fairly quickly with working with these, that is, an individual point can only be in one group. So I can't say, well this is unwanted and also part of the ceiling group. It won't let me do that. So I kind of grab that roof there, that ceiling, put it in an unwanted group. I typically put all the meaningful ones in the area of interest.

One thing to point out is-- once that's done-- there's a piece of equipment in here, like a table. Downstream I want to show how to reverse engineer stuff in Inventor, and I'll grab that table. Right now it's part of the area of interest group. The next thing that's going to happen, it's going to go into a group called table, and notice that it won't be part of this group anymore once that occurs. So I'm going to select that table, just through a regular window selection. And then I can make a new region, we'll call it table. And that will remove it from the area of interest group.

AUDIENCE: Is that going to take those floor points out of there?

STEVE OLSON: Yeah, basically it's going to-- I'm going to have that big square hole there. If I wanted to leave the floor ones in there, I probably could have-- I could have done some random things to get just that depth. And that brings up a good point, if you noticed, while I was drawing that box, it was grabbing everything in that vertical region. So you've got to be really careful when you're grabbing these points, so you're not getting things in front of or behind by accident.

I've done some work with companies that do civil things, like civil work, and they use ReCap to do survey work. And I showed them how to do this with trees. And it's kind of hard to get the tree out of it without hurting or taking away points from the ground. That was definitely a lot of stuff to do. All right. So let me pause these, because that's done with ReCap's portion of that. So let me get back to my slides, they keep me on track.

So the next thing is Inventor. So Inventor's role in the work phase, like I said before, we're going to create a 3D model of the facility. We're going to bring in assets. And I mentioned it before, but there's customized assets that are kind of preloaded, we can download, or we can make our own. So it's just kind of up to you. My work, these videos, will show you how to make one from scratch if you want to, but you also can download those.

I actually saw a really good lab yesterday, I was a lab assistant for a lab yesterday, and the guy talked about, you can actually download all kinds of stuff from GrabCAD, whatever. So the if you don't have the right equipment in that library you can go out and find some stuff that's probably a little bit more accurate. And your level of accuracy is, how deep you want to go? In this case, this lathe isn't exactly the one that's in the facility, but I'm like, well, you know, just to capture its location and be its space claim, this one worked for my needs. But if I was trying to design something around that, then I'm going to want to get the actual thing. If I'm trying to design some sort of venting for it, or something like that, I'm going to want to get the actual model.

So I can place assets from the Asset Library. There's a bunch to download. And again, you can kind of share these. Actually, whenever you post, whenever you create one and save it, you can save it locally in the vaults, or even into the cloud. We can create our custom one. This table is-- I picked a really simple object, so I didn't spend tons of time modeling this table. It can be done in just a few moments. And then you can basically create it as an asset.

And then also, again Inventor does have some utilities for what I call reverse engineering the point cloud. I keep wishing and hoping that they'd work on these. Basically the only options I have for reverse engineering something in Inventor is, I can take one of these points out of the cloud and make it into a work point, or I can have it basically read a certain area of the cloud and interpolate a plane. So I have cloud point and cloud plane, and those was my only two options. I'll show how those can be leveraged here and in a video in just a moment, but to me, I find that lacking. You'll see, when we get to AutoCAD, I like their tools better. I wish Inventor's were a little bit more like AutoCAD.

So let me show you some of the Inventor videos I had. So first off is going to be bringing it in. So here I am in Inventor, I've got a project set up. I'm going to leverage the Factory Design Utilities, so on the Factory tab I'm going to end up telling it I'm going to be creating a new layout. And so it's going to basically build a template. If you haven't seen Factory Design before, it basically shows you a floor, and you kind of work from that.

The Factory Design Utilities are pretty cool because it definitely has-- all of your assets have this landing plane defined in them, and it assumes it's going to land on the floor, which that's what this grid is. This grid is just-- it automatically resizes to whatever your needs are in terms of your model. So it's just kind of in there by default, and it ends up going from there.

So what I'm doing here in this video is, on the Factory tab, I have the point cloud tools, there's an Attach command. And that's what we're going to run. We ran Attach, it will let me put in an RCP or an RCS. Real quickly, the difference is, an RCP is a ReCap project, which can have multiple different scans inside of it. An RCS is a ReCap scan, and individualized scan. So in our case, because we have multiple scans together, it's going to be an RCP. I've seen some workflows where you have to have one scan, it can't have an RCP. But in ReCap there is a way of saying, take everything in my model and convert it into an RCS, or what they call a unified scan, and you have the ability of doing that.

The ReCap project works really well for this. I'm going to tell it a ReCap project. And this is like inserting pretty much anything. I basically click somewhere, just to kind of drop it, and then I get a dialog box, almost like a sketch or a block dialog box in AutoCAD. It's going to say, well, where do you want to put this? And notice I can say, insert at the origin. That way my origin will be consistent across all of my workflows and all of my locations. You can see it dropped it right there.

You'll see that also, one of the newer things that's shown up in Inventor and AutoCAD with these is, I get all these little-- I call them disco balls. I think they call them mirror balls for real, but I guess my brain thinks disco instead. But I get all these little spheres and all these names. That's my scan locations. So they do have this workflow, if for some reason it didn't work for me initially, but now it does, if I have them displayed, I can click or double click on that, and it will actually take me to the scanned data in AutoCAD or in ReCap at that location. I find them in my way. I find that they're in my way. So in the interface up there, there's ability to just turn them off. A little bit later you'll see them turned back on. I'll turn off the indicator or I'll turn off the label and kind of work from there.

But one thing also to point out here is, you notice that my ceiling was not in there. That's because I had it turned off when I brought it in. This navigator here has those regions. I might end up knocking this whole thing down. I can get into the navigator and it will show me my regions that I can turn off or on using those light bulbs, just like an AutoCAD layer. That's the reason I make them. That way I can control that stuff here. It has really not a whole lot of benefit for me in ReCap, obviously I can control them there just like I can control them here, but my main purpose is so I can have the ability to control what I'm seeing here in Inventor. So there it is in ReCap-- or I'm sorry, in Inventor.

So now we're going to take a look at adding some assets. There's a couple lathes right there up against the wall. So I'm going to come over here to my browser. There's a specialized asset browser for Factory that lets me pull from the system assets, or my own custom user assets. So I can even search for them at the top of that. So I searched lathe, and I could see this one here is about the closest to them of what I have, out of all of them.

And it's not downloaded yet, so I have to click on it and have to download-- the download is literally 10 seconds, it's not like a real long download, it's just a real quick one. And so now I have it downloaded. And now I just have to left click and drag it out into my design window. So now you see I have it tied to my cursor. So what I'm going to do is, I typically use the plan view to help me figure out where this thing goes. You can see it has an insertion point there on the corner. And so I'm trying to match it up. Notice how it's nowhere near the size of that one. This one is huge compared to that one. We'll deal with that here in a second.

So I'm going to drop it, and then I can use these grips to rotate and locate it. That's a locator there. So I have to pick on the end of the arrow there, that will allow me to rotate it. Those arrows have two portions. The arrowhead allows me to rotate around it, the shaft of the arrow allows me to move it in that axis. But notice how it landed on the floor. And again, the other key thing here to note is that it's way bigger than that one. We'll deal with that here in just a second. So I've got it placed, it's just a matter of finishing off the location. I'll eventually right click and say done, moving on. We'll try to place another one. I just do the one in this video so I just kind of hit Escape, but I could very easily place both of them. It's not a big deal.

The thing to point out here that's about to happen is, there are assets that are variable in size. You guys work with iParts at all, in Inventor? Anybody use Inventor iParts? Basically the same kind of concept. I have different sizes that are appropriate for this one. So if I click on it and then come over to my browser, I can open up a tab for factory properties.

Notice there's a length and width property over here that I can change. I can have it driven by a table, or I can just have it a free key in. And you'll notice here that I'll key in some numbers, kind of messing around with this one. I want to see if I can make a really itty bitty one, like a really small one, like inch by inch. It won't let you go below certain values. I didn't author this one, so there must be some minimum values there.

But I change those numbers, I hit Update, and because it's scaled in Word-- you can see here I have to reposition this, because it scaled from the center and not from its insertion point-- so I just have to click on it and go to position. And then you can see here I'll click the shaft of the arrow. Click once to start it, it will start moving. I'll try to get it as close to that column as I can, and then click to drop it there, and say done, and now I have a lathe there.

So the next thing is, there is-- I'm trying to remember, I've done this example bunches of times. I think I put the drill press in next. So there's a drill press there in the corner. So I go back to my asset browser. I'll search for drill press. And there's one there. And what's kind of funny about this one is, the person that created this, it's actually a point cloud itself, which maybe might be like, oh wow, a point cloud in a point cloud. But at least this is going to be a space claim. It's going to give you an idea of what that thing looks like.

One thing about each of these, as the process of placing it is identical to the other one. One thing that's kind of important about these is, when you define the asset, you define a 2D and a 3D portion to it. So these are 3D, but there's also a 2D sketch that gets represented. So when we get to AutoCAD, which you'll see here in just a little bit, there will actually be a 2D block sitting where that asset sits. So you actually have representation at a 2D level of that asset. I'll make an asset of the table here in the next video segment. You'll see how that all comes to be. But I just placed it, I rotated it, and there it is.

So I'm going to jump to my next one. So this is where I'm going to end up creating an asset. So I'm going to end up modeling the table all by itself. The one thing that's kind of cool about the ReCap point cloud is I can get measurements off of that. Typically when you're doing jobs you're like, OK, well, I've got to take these 100 different measurements, and then you end up forgetting one or whatnot.

So what I'm going to do here is, I'm going to turn on my scan locations, and like I said, if I click or-- I can't remember if it's a double click, I want to say it's a double click-- it will then launch ReCap, and I can get into the raw scan data of that. So you can see here, it jumps me over here. I don't know why it asked me to register, I already was registered. It must have been some weird thing that happened in the background.

So here I am in ReCap. And it jumps to the raw scan data, which in this case is essentially like a 3D picture. So real quickly here, you'll see that I'm going to start to take some measurements. I don't have to take measurements in the scan, I can actually take them in the point cloud too. You can do in either location, it's completely up to you.

I personally have a little bit-- I'm not sure I feel great about the measurements here, and I've actually heard from other users themselves that whenever you're measuring in ReCap itself, especially the point cloud version, you're getting point to point distances. Which, how do you know you're getting the point on the very, very edge? I don't have confidence, and I'm always doing that. So just be aware of that aspect. In this video I take the measurements in the scan, but again, you can do the same thing out at the ReCap level. There's measurement tools out there.

So it's getting me into that scan. I'm going to orbit around. And I want to get the length, width, and height of this table. When I was doing the video, I think in feet and inches. I forgot to turn the default units from meters over to feet and inches. So when you see the dimensions here in a second, they'll be in meters. But you can see here, I'm going to try to get as close to that edge as I possibly can.