A Whole New "Field to Finish" Using LiDAR Point Clouds

SHAWN HERRING: My name's Shawn Herring. I'm with ProSoft. We're out of Utah. I'm a training/ consulting manager and handle the infrastructure side of things.

I was telling these guys this is the third year out of six they've given me the 8 o'clock class the night after the beer bash. So they either don't like me or hope I can keep you guys awake. Thanks for actually showing up, though. I thought half would be asleep still.

What we're going to talk about today-- I'm not a big PowerPoint person, so I'm going to cruise through this PowerPoint, and then we're going to get into it here. You saw the class handout-- that was probably two weeks late, sorry. Now we're going to go over some LiDar scanning stuff, so we're going to go over ReCap.

The project we're going to use, it's just a road corridor in downtown Billings, Montana, that was scanned. So we're going to import and register our LiDAR data using ReCap. We're going to set up Civil 3D for the "Field to Finish"-- the automated line work, and so forth. We're going to bring in our ReCap file into Civil, and then we're going to create some points and so forth.

So who here uses the "Field to Finish," or the automated line work in Civil 3D? So quite a few of you. I still see a lot that don't. We're kind of basing this on a LiDar scan, but this could be used whether you're scanning or you're just topo-ing out in the field. Same concepts apply when we get into the Civil 3D side of it. We're just going to use that scan to create some points from.

So just a quick overview. The ReCap workflow-- we're going to import. We're going to register. We're going to clean it up. We're going to export it. So the "Field to Finish"-- there's some Figure Prefix Database, Linework Code Set that we're going to set up.

A couple things we may look at there. We're going to import our ReCap file, and then we're going to do some little desktop surveying and create some points. If you have any questions as we go throughout-- I don't care if you wait till the end. Just raise your hand or something, or just yell it out. And we'll answer questions as we go. Whatever you guys need, just feel free.

A little bit about ReCap. Like I said, I'm going to cruise through this PowerPoint and just get right into the software. You know, there's three versions of ReCap today. That's probably going to change tomorrow. You never know. You've got ReCap, you've got ReCap 360, and you've got ReCap 360 Ultimate.

And so what I'm going to be using today is ReCap 360 Ultimate. And really the big thing with the ultimate-- the difference in the three-- is more the registration. So there's some automatic registration tools. There's some point-to-point registration, cloud-to-could, all that, as well as survey control of verification.

So there's a few other little things that are different in ReCap 360 Ultimate, which I'm just going to call ReCap, but those are kind of the big ones. So registration and survey-- that's why we're going to use the Ultimate stuff today, for those tools.

The Simple Workflow-- so we're just going to drag and drop some scans. I'll show you-- depending on the type of scanner, you can pretty much bring anything into ReCap. I'm using FARO scans, so the raw file is from FARO to FLS files.

Simple Workflow-- we're going to drag and drop them in, let them import. We're going to register by picking a few points. We're going to use automatic registration using a few different things. I'll just kind of show you some of the tools in there.

You can see here the formats on the left. And there may be a few more in there, but those are the file types that can be imported. So most scanners and most file types-- I can't think of one that's not supported anymore-- those are going to be able to be imported. And then you can export them out to a few different formats as well.

We're going to set up the databases, like I said. So the line work code set-- very simple. There's really nothing to it. Figure Prefix Database-- again, pretty simple. We'll keep it simple for today as well.

And then we're going to do some editing of that point cloud. We're going to use some of the snaps that-- kind of hidden there-- there are just four point clouds to create our points, and then we're going to manually create a bunch of points in this scan. And then run that through "Field to Finish."

So that's kind of the gist of the next 60 to 90 minutes, wherever we end up on that. Any questions before we jump into it?

AUDIENCE: You said it can import so many file types-- any raw file types or registered file types?

SHAWN HERRING: Any raw file type.

AUDIENCE: So you can take [INAUDIBLE]

SHAWN HERRING: Yeah, I think that's a new-- I know initially it wasn't supported, but I believe it's supported now. Correct me if I'm wrong, anyone, but I'm pretty sure that the raw files now from Leica can be imported then.

AUDIENCE: Because you couldn't before.

SHAWN HERRING: Yeah. Yeah. I think that was the one that was always the hang-up. I'm pretty sure it can. It's something I can double check for you. So I'm going to take a seat here. I'm going to launch ReCap. Let's get rid of this PowerPoint.

Probably the simplest user interface, for those that-- who has used ReCap, the registration and all that, the Ultimate? OK. Good. Pretty straightforward, pretty simple. So we're going to create a new project. So up here in the top left hand, I'm going to go to New Project. You can't see that?

AUDIENCE: Nope.

SHAWN HERRING: That's awesome. Just trust me it works. Are we good now? OK. So I'm going to go ahead and create a new project. It's going to prompt you with this, so where do you want to save it? Here in the bottom-- I'm just going to leave it on my default. Save location-- file name. I'm just going to call it BillingsAU.

When you create a project-- so once you hit Proceed, let me look at the file folder and show you what it creates. When you create a project, it's going to create two files. It's going to create the ReCap project file, and it's going to create the support file.

So don't delete either one of those. You'll need them both. The support file is basically going to make a copy of your raw scans and stuff, converted into that support file. So make sure you have plenty of file space. It'll add up.

So a couple ways to import them. We've got a folder-- that's better. Select files to import, we could go individually. Select the folder, we can point it to a folder and it's going to bring in everything from the folder.

Easier way, I think, is just to come into your scan location. We're just going to drag them over and drop them on the target. It's going to go through the initial import process. I'm not going to sit here and let all those-- that' be a boring class if we just let these import for 25 minutes. But you can see the progress of this first one going, so I'll let this first one go.

So the initial import-- we can begin to register, once a couple of them maybe are imported. I usually choose to allow it to finish before registering. It's going to finish eventually anyway. So once these first ones go, I'll show you. It should go pretty quick.

AUDIENCE: So what's it doing?

SHAWN HERRING: So it's just importing and converting the raw scan data. So if I go back-- let's see if it's started here. So it's starting to bring those in. It always go slower when you're live and not watching football. But yeah, it's just converting those to the RCC file-- the ReCap file. It should go quicker.

I'll show you what it does. We're going to crash this purposely, because I have a baking show ready to go. OK. So once those import-- now let me open up the imported one-- once they're imported, you'll see them change to color or black and white. So if we didn't take pictures or add the color in there, you'll see them a little bit different. This is what they'll look like once they're imported.

So we'll go through, and then the next step is to register. So the import-- very drag and drop, and you're done with step one, the import process. So the next step would be the registration. So down here we've got a couple different options for registration.

You've got the Skip Registration. What that would be more for if you have, let's say, a large LAS file or DEN, or something that's already been registered, and you want to use the ReCap engine, which I would highly suggest bringing it to ReCap before you bring it to Civil 3D. Import that LAS file, skip the registration, save it, and you're done. So that's kind of what the skip is for. That's more if it's already been registered, or you have something that's just a large point cloud that doesn't need registration.

A little bit about ReCap, since I kind of mentioned LAS-- I think AutoCAD itself, if you bring an LAS file in, you're 2 billion points, or something like that. If you run it through the ReCap engine, you're 20 billion plus. Something that would take-- you guys have probably tried to import a large LAS file in the Civil 3D, right? And if it worked, it took a while.

If you take that same LAS file, import it to ReCap, save it, and bring it in to Civil 3D, it's in in a matter of seconds. So if you just use ReCap to save some of those files to run it through the different engine, that'll save tons of time. So something to think about there.

Manual registration-- we're going to do a little bit of the manual registration. That's where we'd go in and pick the points and stitch it together ourselves. Now in the latest versions-- and this was a few months ago, I think-- you've got register scans, which is the automatic registration, and we're going to use that first. We're going to have it do kind of a cloud-to-cloud registration for us. It doesn't always do 100% of them, and so then you'll have some manual work to do. But it gets you a good start.

So I'm going to select that-- register scans. And so this one, there's 13 scans in here. This will probably just take a minute, not long at all. But it's going through and it's trying to match them up. It's creating scan groups. So we can see here at the top, we've got the scan groups. And this one, I think we'll end up with three groups.

AUDIENCE: You mention the point [INAUDIBLE]

SHAWN HERRING: I don't before. Yeah, usually on the back side of it, before I export to an RCS, we mess with that.

AUDIENCE: They're not RCS files yet?

SHAWN HERRING: These ones are-- no, they're not RCA files yet.

AUDIENCE: If we're going to make RCS files, we're [INAUDIBLE]

SHAWN HERRING: We're going to export our RCPs to an RCS. So right now they're RCC.

AUDIENCE: No, I think it's the other way.

SHAWN HERRING: Maybe it's the other way. That's possible.

AUDIENCE: I got confused by it, because it's so similar-sounding. One references the other, though.

SHAWN HERRING: Let me pull up this file, support file. Yeah, so it creates the RCCs when you import, and then you export to RCS, which is a combined indexed point cloud file.

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

SHAWN HERRING: We'll go over that a little bit more when I export it out there. But yeah, you got RCP, RCC, RCS. We'll try to clear it up a little bit today, with some of this stuff. So that went-- well, that didn't take too long, right? So that did kind of the auto registration.

This says here of the 13 scans, we've got three groups created. One scan remaining, which means it couldn't take that scan and register it with anything. So there's kind of just a rogue scan out there that we've got to manually register. So again, it saved us a little bit of time.

Going to hit OK here. You can look at the different groups. So you always have one group on the left. If I hover over that, I can jump from group to group. You've got a group on the right. The one with the question mark is all the unregistered groups, so let me switch over to that. So this is one, and we'll register this one here shortly.

So I've got group two, group three, some of those. It's always running in auto registration, so once I switch to this-- it says Billings08 up there-- it's looking for points in common. Don't get too excited about that. It works. But like you can see here, it would stitch it together if I said merge scans, and this one is like a mile apart.

Sometimes this can throw you off, but if you hover over this, you're going to get a quick preview and know that that's probably not correct there. But depending on your scan, everything as we go through, you'll see this turn green, you'll see a red, you'll see it just be good to go sometimes. We can jump around from scan to scan within these groups.

So if I go scan one-- I'm at my different scan location-- I can use this here. I can pick it from the top down view. I can do a 3D preview. So if I want a quick 3D preview of this one group, I can hit 3D preview. We'll give it a second.

And then I can see that initial scan or two, or whatever is in that group. You can turn one off, you can turn them all off, all on. But it just gives you a good, quick inspection of that thing. I'm going to hit OK here.

So I'm going to jump over to scan number one, and we're going to register this with scan number two. So I'm going to pick-- let's find what group that is. So this group's got scan two through seven on it. It says it thinks there's a match. You can come in here and look.

And this one looks close, but I know it's not correct, so we're going to register manually these two groups together by picking a few points. So I'm going to zoom around here. You've got to pick three points on the left, three points on the right, in whatever order. You can do all three on the left, you can go one, one.

So I'm going to come, and I'm going to choose-- no targets here, so I don't have any targets, right? So we're just going to use features-- buildings, the road, whatever it is, for our targets. So I'm going to start picking a couple points here. So I'm going to pick the zero, kind of right in the middle. I'm going to zoom in here and pick that same point. Let's find a couple other.

AUDIENCE: Is that a target on the boulder? Yeah, this one is a sphere target. I don't use those anymore, but you can still use targets. You can see here on the bottom where I can identify the checkerboard target, or identify one of the spherical targets.

AUDIENCE: You just use the [INAUDIBLE] ones?

SHAWN HERRING: What's that?

AUDIENCE: You just don't need those any more?

SHAWN HERRING: In ReCap, it's targetless registration. So depending on the project, I still use checkerboard targets, just for my own sake when I'm going through a project. Let's take a hospital that's got a ton of rooms in there. A lot of them look very similar. I use targeting more just to keep me straight. But you don't have to use targets, because you can just use features. So I'm going to pick a couple more. I can't remember which ones I picked before. Let's pick kind of the base here of this pole, the base of this pole.

AUDIENCE: How close do you need to be when you're picking your points?

SHAWN HERRING: They say within a foot, and they are AutoDesk, but I try to pick pretty close. So I don't know if anyone has any feedback there, but I try to pick as close as I can. The closer, the better.

So let's pick something completely random. Let's say we think that is that point, and let's pick this point. Once I pick that third point, it's going to attempt again to register the groups together if we hover over here. So it says "poor match found," and it's red. And that actually looked better than the other one.

But if you pick-- let's do that again. Let's do something completely-- let's pick our third point over here. There. That's a little bit more obvious that it's off, right? OK. So you don't have to accept that. You're not accepting any results until you hit Merge Scan. And even once we hit Merge Scan, there's another option to reject it.

So I'm going to remove those points. I can move them, but I kind of like to just delete them. Let's pick another point. One, two, three, so right around here. If I hover over these points, I select-- you've got that X to delete it, and you also have this little teardrop, which I can mark as a survey point.

So if I have control-- and maybe that's why you could use checkerboard targets, because you can survey those targets, center a target, and key in your X, Y, Z. So if I want to tie this into some sort of control, I can just easily add that as a survey point and call it good. I'm not going to do that here. I think I'm on third. Something like that.

So that one's green. So that one we're happy with. We think it works. We're good. It's going to give us a registration report as well. I'll show you that. So once we've picked our three points, we're good with the preview, the result, I'm going to hit Merge Scan. And so we've got group one, two scans, group two, six scans. It's now going to merge into one group, so I'm going to hit Merge Scan.

So pretty quick. So we can look at a top-down view. So that merged those pretty quick. Not a ton of time it took there.

AUDIENCE: Can I ask a quick question?

SHAWN HERRING: Yeah, you sure can.

AUDIENCE: Can you merge different compatible ones [INAUDIBLE]?

SHAWN HERRING: I've never done it. I don't see why you couldn't, though. That's a good question.

AUDIENCE: There are applications that we can't always use directly [INAUDIBLE].

SHAWN HERRING: That'd be something to try. I don't see why you couldn't, though. I'm going to do that later. See, now you're making me work. So I did the scan with like a C10, and I did one with the FARO. I can bring them all in. I'll give it a shot.

Again, we can look at the 3D preview, but we can see kind of what happened there. Let me go to scan seven now. And again, the unregistered ones are the ones with the question mark. So I want to go ahead and get that registered. So my register scanned seven to scan eight. And as I was saying before, it's always automatically registering it as you switch scan to scan.

So I like this one. So I don't even need to pick any points on this scan. I'm just going to go in and just hit Merge Scan. Looks good, let's hit Merge Scan.

You'll get this often. If it's good, and if it meets all of whatever those percentages are supposed to be, it's going to automatically send it over. Used to it'd turn green, yellow, red. Now it just goes yellow or red, and if it's green, it automatically does it. But you can hover over, and you can see the result.

So if we-- I'll zoom in here for you. It's saying we have a balance of 1.8 and overlap of 2.5, and points in common with the six millimeter accuracy of 88%. That's actually pretty low. Typically I probably would try to not accept that. These ones happen to be far apart, so I'm not surprised by these two-- ah, wrong button-- these two things here.

A balance of 20% and overlap of 30% and accuracy of like 98% is typically what you want to see there. But in some cases, depending on the scan situation, you may just be able to accept that and be good. So that's the second refinement process. So it gives you another chance to reject it, pick more points, and move forward. For the sake of this class, I'm just going to hit approve.

One more group that we have to do here. We've got scan eight to scan nine. So we're going to pick a few points. Although that's green, I'm still going to pick a few points, if I can remember where I'm at here.

Let's use this building. So I'm going to use this area here. This one. I could probably get closer. I think in my handout I said we're going to do a bridge, so I'm glad nobody noticed we're not doing a bridge. And I hope those that wanted to see a bridge don't mind.

All right. Where am I at? One more point. Let's just choose this grate over here. So again, random points without targeting.

On this one-- let's come closer to here, actually-- this one I was in my truck. It was freezing in Billings, Montana. And so I mounted the tripod on the back in my truck, and you can run it from your phone, and that was great. So besides a few of those sphere targets, I was not getting out of the truck.

We're good there. We're going to go ahead and merge that. Give it a minute.

OK. So that's all of the scans. Once all your scans from all groups have been combined into one, you've now got the option to index those scans. We'll do a couple things prior to indexing.

Indexing is really the last step before you go in there and you clean up your point cloud-- you delete points, you remove people, trees, that type of stuff. The indexing probably takes more than importing, so it's another one, hit that button, go to lunch or something. It does take a little while to index those scans.

But there's a few things that we can do here. So again, we can inspect it. We can see our registration report, so we can come in here and look. You usually want to see those green. We can see why we're not. You've got a registration report.

We can go and look at RGB. So I'm always set to the color, but if we go to intensity, it's going to kind of take out that color. It's just going to be the grayscale intensity.

Sometimes it's easier to register that. Sometimes in a scan situation, there's no lighting, so you don't even have color. So again, you can register without that color. Sometimes it's a little bit crisper. These are like cars and stuff, people. We'll get rid of them. I'm going back to color.

A few settings that we want to look at before we index, though. Up here at the top right, we have view the scanner related settings, or the filter the data. We've got filtering here in the top. We've got advanced. We can clip the points based on a range.

There's just different options in here. Probably the more important one, though, is going to be on this advanced thing. You've got decimation, so we could reduce the number of points if we wanted to, so we can do that at this point. I think that was what you were looking for, right? Did you ask me about that? Someone was.

The coordinate system-- this is an important one. If you want it tied-- you know, we're tying it with some survey-- we could tie it with some survey control, if we want to set this to a coordinate system, this is where we do it. There's like three other places that set a coordinate system, but doesn't work. So you have to set it here. I think I noted that in the handout. That's something that I overlooked for a long time.

AUDIENCE: Can it revert your [INAUDIBLE]

SHAWN HERRING: You can do that in Civil 3D. Yeah, I think you can do-- here's the current, and there's the target. So once we export it, I could set the current to something-- I'm not going to set one, but yeah, I can pick a coordinate system here.

And then if I choose a different one for the target, when I export to RCS, it's going to apply that different coordinate system. So either one of those. I think it's the same coordinate systems that are in Civil and Map, so I don't think there's a difference in there.

AUDIENCE: Can you have [INAUDIBLE]?

SHAWN HERRING: What's that?

AUDIENCE: I don't think they have all the [INAUDIBLE] in ReCap.

SHAWN HERRING: OK. I haven't looked to see if they have all, but that'd be strange, if they have it all.

AUDIENCE: They said they were working on that, getting all the [INAUDIBLE].

SHAWN HERRING: Yeah. That's 2017.

AUDIENCE: Can you apply custom [INAUDIBLE] or additional ones?

SHAWN HERRING: Not that I know. I don't think you can. It's a good question, though. I doubt it.

AUDIENCE: But if you're still a 3D process, you can probably [INAUDIBLE].

SHAWN HERRING: Yeah. You can adjust it in Civil, but I don't think you can create anything in here. There might be some backdoor coding or something that could happen, but not natively in the software.

All right. So you want to do some of that, we're not going to do any decimation but you've got the coordinate system. You've got some filtering, and so forth. Let me go back to my scan.

The index process-- once that's been registered, we'll go to index. That's going to take a little while. We're not going to-- I'm not going to do that right now. I'm going to open one up that I just indexed. So that'd be the last step before we clean up the point cloud. So any questions there on the importing and the registration?

AUDIENCE: Can you import other types of clouds, like drone-captured [INAUDIBLE]?

SHAWN HERRING: Yeah, there's a workflow around that. You can definitely merge the two and work through those. If you want, you can shoot me an email, and I can send you a document on that. But it's not that bad.

AUDIENCE: Was the reference on there for six millimeter accuracy-- what exactly does that refer to?

SHAWN HERRING: Just the points in common for my cloud-to-cloud. So one scan to the next scan. What's the best way to explain that? Really, it's the points in common. So it's your overlap points. So we have two scans that are kind of overlapped with each other. If they're crossing like that, they're not going to be accurate.

But if they're registered right and kind of scanned right, it's just the amount of points that-- the amount of common points that are accurate to each other. What's the best way to explain that? You know. I'm trying to think of the best way to explain that, but it's just points in common, and the accuracy between those two points, all the other two billion points.

AUDIENCE: Registration [INAUDIBLE]

SHAWN HERRING: I'm going to open up another file here that's already been indexed. OK. So once it's indexed, you've got some more tools in here. So this is kind of the index scan-- a bunch of just random points out there.

A few tools we can do. So if you want to do an initial clean up, come down here to the bottom. We've got some window tools, some fencing tools, some dimensions. But I want to just get rid of a bunch of points, some of these points we just don't need.

I'm going to come to my fence tool, and I'm just going to Window-- let's just call it this area-- double click it. We can clip it. Clip it doesn't delete those points. It just kind of clips you out. I'm going to go ahead and delete those. So here at the bottom, I'm just going to hit delete, and it's going to remove those points from the scan.

So let's fence some more stuff here. I'm just going to get pretty close for today. Delete some of those. Delete some of those. So a simple tool in there-- just the fence, and delete it.

Some other things you can do-- so let's take this tree, for example, and this will really help in Civil 3D. What's the window we had, just to keep with the fence? We can do a window, but we won't do the fence. We want to get rid of this tree, but maybe we don't want to delete it.

Once I double-click it-- and I used the delete before-- there's this thing called the region. Region basically to me is a layer. So if I had those trees, to say a vegetation layer, I'm going to say New Region, and I'm going to call this trees. Hit OK. Somehow it turned green. That was just kind of coincidence there.

On here, so here in the bottom right-- and this is what you'll see in Civil 3D, too. You'll see some of these regions-- we can turn on and off the tree. So I'm going to just hide the region-- turn off the eyeball there and get that out of the scan for now. So I'm not deleting it, but turning off a layer.

So if I go down to some of these other ones here-- I'll just do a couple. Add that to the tree region, and we can kind of go through all those and clean that up pretty quick.

Same thing with buildings. There's another one that I like to use for buildings. We did the fence, the window, but there's a plane. So if I want to say let's do a plane, I'm going to pick a bunch of points along this building, and it's going to create a plane from however many other points I choose. So you can see how it's selected anything along that plane.

I can do the same thing there. I can come into my region, add a new region, and call that a building. And then I could go through there and I could keep going, and kind of clean those up. So without having automatic classification tools, that's a good way to classify your point cloud. Just add and create new regions in there.

So we could do it. We could continue on through there and get rid of some stuff. You'll see cars. You'll see people. You'll see a lot of that stuff in there. There is a new tool-- I'll tell you about it, but I don't want to push the button. It's called Clean Up. It's in a beta stage, but it goes through and it identifies unwanted points, so people and cars.

And it doesn't delete them-- forget it. We'll push the button. Let's clean it up. It's cloud-based. I'm not on the internet. Trust me, it works. You hit that, and it's going to go through and just add it to a region. Again, it doesn't delete points, and so that's a good thing.

It did a bunch of random stuff on this one, but it did get rid of my truck. In all the scans, it got rid of that. It got rid of some of the people, some of the cars passing by. So that's kind of a quick, easy cleanup tool that's in the beta process. So we can edit, we can delete them. We can add features to regions. Do a few different cleanup things there.

Some of the other tools here-- we'll just blow through the ReCap stuff real quick. How do you want to see these? First, concrete slab verification-- this works really well, so we can do elevation analysis. We can do intensities. Scan location, so that's kind of a different color per location. Just different ways of viewing that point cloud.

AUDIENCE: Can you go to the lighting options?

SHAWN HERRING: Want to go to the lighting?

AUDIENCE: The points are right there.

SHAWN HERRING: Yeah, these ones-- so let me go back to my RGB lighting. It's kind of like a camera, an exposure. So in this case, I was scanning in the middle of the day, with sun everywhere. So it kind of takes the exposure from the RGB and removes certain points.

Again, when you're scanning in the light, sometimes those scans look pretty bad in RGB but they're great in the intensity. That kind of allows you to stay in RGB but remove that bright light. So it's kind of more camera-related. Shader model-- I never really mess with these. It's not doing too much.

AUDIENCE: Like you're saying, sometimes [INAUDIBLE] intensity and the elevation [INAUDIBLE].

SHAWN HERRING: Say that again, I'm sorry.

AUDIENCE: Some of these settings here-- I don't know if you know what I'm asking, but when you're in the other-- not the RGB but it's the intensity or elevation, I've seen some dramatic changes, but I don't know why those changes occur.

SHAWN HERRING: With the lighting on?

AUDIENCE: No, all these things.

SHAWN HERRING: With all of them.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

SHAWN HERRING: OK. Honestly, I'm not 100% sure why those do some of that. I don't mess with them too much.

AUDIENCE: You don't use them either?

SHAWN HERRING: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: That's just what I was going to ask.

SHAWN HERRING: I know the lighting is more with the camera and so forth, the shade. Again, that's not doing anything. The edge highlighting, that is what it says-- just highlighting the edges of buildings and roads and all that. Why you would use that, I don't know why you would use it. But there's an option there. I can't think of a good case to use that.

AUDIENCE: If you go to intensity and turn [INAUDIBLE] lighting on, it's a little different. I mean, it's not radically, and I don't know what use it is [INAUDIBLE].

SHAWN HERRING: Yeah. Not 100% sure on that. Some of those I haven't really saw a value to use, so I haven't looked at it very much. Maybe I should.

I'm going to get back to something. You can look at different size of your points, point display. I usually drop it down to one. Update the origin-- so if you're going into Revit, this is not a bad idea to-- you can set like zero, zero, or whatever where you want, and you can set the coordinates to match into Revit. We often go into Revit.

This just turns on certain things. So the mirror balls, let's go back to-- these are called mirror balls. Those are basically your scanned locations. This just turns them on or off.

If I go into the mirror ball-- I don't think I've gone into one-- but let me double-click this one. That takes you back into that scan view, kind of that 360 panorama. It's going. So it takes you back into that scan view. We can do some measurements.

We can do some markups, some noting. So I can add a note in here. I don't even know what to say, but we'll add a note. So when you share this to the cloud, maybe you're sharing this with someone who doesn't have ReCap, they can see your notes. They can see your markups, and so forth. When I go back to my 3D view, those notes are still there. So I can make those notes in either option.

We're not going to look at too much of the navigation. I think we're good as far as the ReCap side. Any questions on the ReCap, just kind of the quick cleanup that we went through and registration? Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Now, when you work [INAUDIBLE]

SHAWN HERRING: No. No. In fact, I think it'd be a lot easier to work with it in Civil 3D if you brought it into ReCap. I mean, you can do that in the free ReCap, so it doesn't take ultimate to do that.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

SHAWN HERRING: Yeah, I'd bring it-- because you're ultimately probably wanting to get it into Civil 3D, right?

AUDIENCE: Oh, I bring the text files [INAUDIBLE]

SHAWN HERRING: I'll show you at the end here why I would use ReCap, because of the surface creation, some of the cleanup that you can do for the bare ground, and maybe a volume calc or something. So I would bring it through ReCap, and then bring the ReCap file to Civil 3D, which I'll do. That might save you some time there.

So I think we're good there. The last step, I would export this out. If I just bring in an RCP, I could bring this into Civil 3D without a problem. But some of those edits that we made, some of those clipping, deleting the points don't quite come across. You'll still come in with a bunch of that stuff not cleaned up.

AUDIENCE: When you export RCP, can you turn off certain regions and then you export some of those regions for [INAUDIBLE]?

SHAWN HERRING: Yup. So in this case, here's the import. Here's the export. Export's going to take a while, so I'm not going to. But the export options are CP, RCS, PTS, E57, and PCG. So pretty much anything can take-- any software, whether we're using AutoDesk or not-- will take an E57 or a PTS or something.

We're going to export to RCS, which I already did. And so you select that, you save it out. Simple export. Let me close this down. Let's get into Civil 3D now. So that's the recap side of it.

So we've got to do a little bit of setup real quick in Civil 3D for the "Field to Finish." So I want to make sure we get that. That doesn't take long at all, then we'll bring our recap file in. I'm going to start with-- probably should've started with the template.

A few things to set up. So on the survey tabs-- we're on our tool space. We're on the survey tab-- we're just going to look at a couple things here. We've got line work code set, and we've got the figure prefix database. Let's do the line work code step first.

I'm going to right click here and go to New. I already created one, but we're going to go to New. And let's call it something here. So this is probably the simplest thing to set up in Civil 3D. As we're coding it in the field, or as we're going to do today, code it in the office, we're going to use some of these special codes, but we're just going to use a few. So when we want this to automatically draw our line work, we need to tell it where to begin, where to end, where curves are, and so forth.

So the special codes here-- it's as simple as changing Begin. I see a lot of people do B, begin feature. I could have a one there for begin. Very simple set up. So we're going to have B for begin, E for end, CLS for close. We're going to leave most of this. The curves-- we're going to begin curve BC, end curve EC, point on curve OC.

So something-- if you're coding out in the field, something that may take an extra few minutes in the field, by just adding this simple code in there, as you guys know that are using the automated line work, that will save you some time in the office. So I'm going to leave most of those. I don't think they even changed anything. Most of those are pretty standard.

Any questions on the code set? That's probably the easiest thing. So the code set is telling it how to draw it. The figure prefix database that we need to set up is kind of telling it what to draw and what style, what layer, so forth.

So we're going to create a new figure prefix database, if I can remember which ones I did. We're just going do some TBC, and a few things in there. So same thing-- I'm going to create that new one, right click, and go to Manage Figure Prefix Database. And this is fairly simple set up-- we're just going to hit the plus sign here.

And let's do a TBC. So we need to give it a name. Whether it's a brake line or not, we can say yes. Whether it's a lot line or not, I'm going to say no. A layer-- let's throw it on existing curb-- and a style-- curb. This could get pretty long. We can add another one in there. I'm going to do edge of pavement, so EOP.

Again, whatever you want to add, make these say. Brake line. Layer. If I don't have a layer-- if my layer doesn't exist and I create one here, in this EOP, I actually think it does that-- it's going to create a new layer in your drawing. So you don't have to go to Layer Manager. Whatever you do here is going to create a new layer.

AUDIENCE: Are you doing this every time you go out in the field for every project, or do you have your list of templates where that's already in there, in your workflow?

SHAWN HERRING: Yeah. That's a good question. This is the one-time set up. You may tweak it here and there, like anything else, but yeah. You just have to set it up one time. So this one might take an hour, depending on how extensive your list is. But yeah, it's a one time thing. It's a database. I'll show you where it saves it. You can throw it on the network or whatever, but yeah, you definitely don't have to do this every single time. This is a one time.

AUDIENCE: Just be careful when you [INAUDIBLE]

SHAWN HERRING: What's that?

AUDIENCE: Be careful if you're on a server that it go [INAUDIBLE]

SHAWN HERRING: On the figure prefix database? I've never seen that. I'll look at that, because I've never seen that. We've put it on a lot of servers.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

SHAWN HERRING: Interesting. Yeah, we should look at that. I've never seen the need for that.

Let's see-- layer style. Let's do EOP here again. Asphalt. Let's keep going. So let's say we have something close, maybe sidewalk, which is kind of the same. We've got the same style. We can copy these. So I'm going to copy this TBC one down, and I'm just going to change the name-- sidewalk.

So you can see it kind of kept the same properties, and then I can change just minor things here if I wanted to. Fences, buildings, whatever it is that you want to add in here. So again, this one might be a little time consuming to set up the first time-- you know, spend a few hours, but that's definitely going to be worth it.

Any questions? I'm not going to finish this one but any questions on this part of it, the figure prefix database? This is the line work. It's the layer. It's the style. It's the survey figure that it's going to draw. So those are really the two things you need for "Field to Finish," for the most part. Line work code set, which is very simple. That's the beginning and ending, and then figure prefix database.

There's also an equipment database. We're not going to mess with that, but I'll just show you what it is. Has anyone ever messed with that? Have you? OK. That's more equipment related, depending on what you're using-- just some standard deviations, and so forth, in there. So again you can mess with that. We're not going to change that today. So just that simple set up that we need there to run it. Align our code set, figure prefix database.

So let's bring in that ReCap file. I'm going to go to the Insert tab. We're going to go to Attach. It attaches as an extra. Go ahead and select Attach here. This AutoDesk ReCap launches ReCap, if it works.

My ReCap's already open. It should launch ReCap. There we go. All right. Let's go to Attach, and let's bring in the RCS file that we exported.

So that file is two gig. That's a big file, right? There's a lot of points in there. If I was bringing this in with any other format beside ReCap, this would take a little while. So two gig's a big file.

So I'm going to choose that. I'm going to hit Open. Just like an extra-- full path, insertion point, all that fun stuff. I'm going hit OK. And it's in there. It doesn't really think of it more than a polyline-- there's really nothing in there.

And that's why I would use the ReCap engine for like an LAS file, or something that's so big, because that engine just allows it to run so much more smoothly. It's crazy how quick some of those come in. So simple, right? Just import. Any questions on that?

If we select our point cloud-- if we select our point cloud, we get some tools up here on the ribbon. Similar-- we've got point size. I don't want to mess with that too much. The level of detail, how we want to display it and orbit it. Scan colors-- so we've got some of those same things. We can see the elevation, so forth, in there.

Transparency-- let's zoom in a little bit. I find it easier to adjust my transparency when I'm picking points, because you can kind of see the quality I think looks actually pretty good when it comes to messing with some of these. It kind of helps me to go around and see. So I'm going to set that. I'm just going to leave it whatever we set it there.