Design for the Future: 3D Scanning, ReCap, and AutoCAD

HEIDI HEWETT: Hi. I'm so glad all of you are here. It's great to see a full room for this topic. My name is Heidi Hewitt. I'm the AutoCAD technical marketing manager at Autodesk. And I also have Mike Mizuno helping present today. He's with the Reality Solutions group at Autodesk.

So before we get started, I'm just curious. How many of you use AutoCAD? Yeah? OK. And how many of you have used ReCap? Anybody? OK. So any of you have actually done the scanning yourself? All right. So we have a mix.

OK. Well, hopefully, we can share some. For those of you that may have done all of those together, hopefully we've got some other new tips or something else for you to learn here. But what I want to do is go through and just kind of take you through a project that I have done and has really-- I mean, I've always kind of been intrigued by 3D scanning and ReCap. But having done this project myself on my own personal projects, it has really just convinced me. This is the future.

OK. We're used to the past. And some of you may even remember 2D drafting. And even if you have a computer, you might lay down your sheets, and you do some measurements off of it.

Does anybody remember back when 2D scanners were a premium? You had to go to the library if you wanted to scan something. Anybody remember that? You thought, I'm never going to have that in my house. There's no way.

And does anybody not have a 2D scanner in their house? Right? You just have it. It's part of your printer. Everybody has it.

I completely, honestly believe that's the direction we're heading with 3D scanning. And it's totally exciting with what we can do.

So that's the past, but we are heading to the future. So what we're going to cover today is-- and we don't have a lot of time. There's a whole lot to cover. I'm just going a little bit into everything. But really, my goal here for today is to take you through the process as an AutoCAD user. I'm not a ReCap expert. I'm just an AutoCAD user that's intrigued by the technology.

And I want you to see how easy it is to get through the process from scanning into ReCap, take it into AutoCAD, and do your designs. For those of you that do use AutoCAD, how many of you use AutoCAD in 3D, do 3D modeling? OK, great. Well, we've got a jump-start. That's the only part that even takes some skill mastering those commands. The rest of it's really pretty easy.

OK. So we're going to talk about this project. Then we'll go through the process of capturing and just some tips of what to do if you're actually capturing with the scanner. Mike is actually going to introduce you to one of the scanners here and take you through some of the details of that and really show you why it's so easy, it's within reach, to be able to use this technology.

And then I'll take you through some of the processing that you can do, just the very minimum that you can do in ReCap. There's a whole lot that you can do, but I want to take you through just the few things I did so that I could take my scan project into AutoCAD and create my designs in there.

And then just a little time. I won't spend much time in AutoCAD, because there's a whole lot that we can do in there with 3D modeling. But I want to just show you some of the tools that are key to taking that 3D scan and then starting to model.

OK. So let's get started. So this is actually a townhome that I bought about a year ago, and it was vacant. And I was able to borrow a 3D scanner from the Autodesk team. I didn't really know why I was scanning. I just really like scanning. So I took it up there and spent some time while it was completely empty, scanned everything I could think of that I might need-- for what, I didn't know.

But it turned out to be invaluable that I had all this 3D data inside and out. And at the time, I lived about two hours away. So this is in Colorado, and I lived in the Denver area. This is up in the mountains. And I didn't know at the time that having this 3D data on my computer where I live two hours away was just going to save me so much time, so many trips up there, and enable me to share it with other people that I was working with to start some of these projects.

So I'm just going to just show you a few before and after pictures. This is one of the rooms. This is a guest room, and I turned it into my office, as well.

So using 3D scanning, the image behind it was from the scan that I took, one of the pictures that it took. And using that, I brought it into AutoCAD, designed this whole Murphy bed thing that we built out of lumber. That's on the left side. That's the guest side. The right side over here by the window is the office side.

So all of this completely designed in AutoCAD with minimal effort by taking that 3D scan and designed it completely remote, living two hours away, which saves a lot of trips when your hardware store isn't handy and you have to stop on the way up there. So just a lot of value there.

This is another project. This is the back of the townhome. And you can see that tree there. That's going to be key. We'll talk about that in a minute.

But we wanted to-- first thing we wanted to do is build a deck and fence to keep the dogs in. So again, doing all this remote, designing it all remote, and being able to come up with that design, get it permitted, get it approved by the HOA, and get that design going as quick as possible.

All right. So the first step in the process is capturing the 3D data. Again, I didn't know why I was capturing it. I just thought it would be fun to do.

So I took a scanner. The one that I used was this FARO scanner that you see here on the left side. And I took that up. I placed it in various locations. And if you look over here-- actually, I'll get to that in a second. So that's the one I used.

On the right side, this is another one. There are a lot of different scanners, and Mike may address that more. He'll definitely be talking about this Leica scanner here on the lower right.

So what I did is I took that scanner up here to the site. And wherever you see these balls-- and there's many more of them. I think I did over 40 scans-- that's where the scanner was placed on a tripod, like what you see over here.

And I just placed it at various locations inside and out and captured these scans onto a hard drive. In my case, I had it on a little SD card in the scanner and then plugged it into my computer later and went from there. And I'll show you the process after that.

So now, I'm going to hand it over to Mike so he can talk just a little bit more about that process. And then I'll take it back over.

MIKE MIZUNO: So I'll talk about some of the basic concepts behind scanning. Looked like most people here were familiar-- I'll stand over here-- were familiar with scanning technologies. But this is the BLK360 scanner that you see here right in front of you.

And most scanners are very typical in how they're built. There's a spinning mirror inside. That thing's rotating pretty quickly, depending on the model. And the whole base is kind of doing a whole 360-degree turn. As that mirror is turning, there's a laser shooting out, sending a signal out, and reading that back. And it's giving that distance measurement.

And depending on the hardware, it can be anywhere from 5-millimeter accuracy over maybe 30 meters to millimeter accuracy, in some cases. So depending on your application and how accurate you need to be, there's a whole variety of different systems out there.

So next slide. So that's the laser on that one side hitting the mirror that then gets kind of splashed out into the room. The next one there. So the other part of it is when you're just getting a distance measurement, you're really just getting an [? xyz ?] coordinate, really. There's no other information besides that.

The visible light cameras are also taking photos. They'll do a single pass for photos and do another pass for the laser measurement. What the photos will do is allow us to colorize the point cloud. So the images that you would take, just like on your phone, you project that back onto the scan data, and that gives the color to the scan. Otherwise, it'd just be black and white data. So that helps with the visualization side of things when you take it into AutoCAD or any other workflows that Autodesk supports.

Case with the BLK, there's three visible cameras. And there's also an infrared camera. Some of the higher end scanners have had infrared. There's one or two that I can think of. This is the first one kind of in the lower price range that has added the infrared camera.

So we're still really exploring what people want to do with an infrared camera. So the RGB data, like I said, to colorize the point cloud. But what type of things can we expect our customers to be doing or do they want to do if we add another channel of information-- in this case, infrared?

So there's people who are interested in maybe building energy analysis. I've talked to customers who are interested in inside of plant environments, looking at equipment heat, so trying to identify equipment that maybe needs maintenance, those kind of things. So the fact that the sensor's there will give us future workflows and things that we can support in ReCap and into AutoCAD and the other products, too.

So I'll quickly start a scanner. I'm going to plug in ReCap for mobile. So last year, at Autodesk University, we announced a new platform for ReCap. So up to now, it's always been on the desktop or on the web. And so last year, we announced a partnership with Leica-- might need to switch the video there to eight-- and announced something that would run on an iPad Pro.

And some of the kind of motivations behind adding it to the iPad were more around the workflows. So the workflow that Heidi already described-- getting an SD card, taking that back to your office, registering it there in ReCap back on your desktop-- that assumed that she got adequate coverage. She had all the scans that she needed. She had all the angles for the point cloud.

But what we hear from customers a lot is that either they don't get adequate coverage-- this is a line of sight, so if I'm in the way standing here, it's not going to scan through me or past me. And so that will put, basically, a hole in the data. It's going to hit me and not hit anything behind me. So those types of things, when you get back to the office, those were challenges that our customers were kind of vocalizing, that they wanted to see the quality of the point cloud while they were out in the field before they left the field so they didn't get back to the office then figure out they had a problem and have to go back and rescan.

The other part was really just the ease of use. So in the last 20 years, the scanning technology has been around in some form or the other. And the accessibility of it's changed from 20 years ago to today. 20 years ago, you had to be a PhD student to know how to handle the data coming in and know how to stitch it all together, to the point today where we wanted to make it as easy as possible for anyone who really doesn't necessarily need survey type of knowledge to simply go out there, grab some scans, and go into some of the workflows that Heidi will talk about in a second.

So I'm going to kick off a new scan here. And with the iPad Pro, the information is going to be streaming in. So if you take a look right now, this is simply doing a quick calibration. It's figuring out how to level itself. So this tripod is probably not level the way I set it up. It's figuring out if it's level or not, and it's going to automatically compensate for that.

And right now, it's going to go through and do a bunch of photos. So it's taking some photos in that one single pass. This one is unique in that it has three cameras. So most scanners have a single camera, and they have to use the mirror to actually change the direction. This one has three cameras built in, so it takes three shots pretty quickly.

And before you came in, I was doing some scanning. Let me open one of these up. So this is as everyone was walking in.

And so this is the data that's really streamed. As the scan is happening, I can take a look at it. I can see the quality of the space. I can see something maybe that I don't want to include in my scans. So if there's a post or a box sitting in the way that I don't want my final data, I can move it. I can see it here right away.

Also, this one already registered. ReCap has been the registration point for all the data. So when Heidi took that SD card back to her office, she plugged it into ReCap, and that stitched all the individual scans together. So all those mirror balls that she was talking about all have to be relatively positioned to each other, because they don't really know how they relate to each other until ReCap touches them.

That's all traditionally been done on the desktop. But with ReCap Pro for mobile, we wanted to do the stitching and registration right on the iPad device. Because that's part of the quality pipeline. You have to see the entire project and how each of the relative scans fit together in order to have an idea of the quality.

So if you take a look, this is a top-down view. An iPad Pro is definitely powerful hardware but still not powerful enough to show an entire point cloud in full 3D glory. But what we can do is we can figure out the relative position of these, do all the registration, and then show you a top-down view.

So these are two scan positions I did as everyone was coming in, and I can see this is right behind the projector right over here. I had it over there. That blocked spot is data that's missing, because the projector table was in the way.

Now, I can make a decision when I'm in the field to say, there's something important there. I need to make sure I capture it. And I can take another scan on this side of the projector. Or I can say, that's OK. I don't need that data. I'm ready to go. So the beauty of having that information right away is that you can make those decisions, where before, you couldn't.

Well, actually, let me show one more thing here. Sorry. The other part about it is when you have this data, you can start querying it right away. So the distance measurements, since there's the scan as well as the image data, that's all accessible to me here on the iPad. And right now, I set it to metric. But you can, of course, set it to imperial.

The other information that you can also do is do markups. So if there's something about this space right here, I can add some details.

And you can also even add images on top of it. So if I wanted to do something-- let's see here. Take a quick photo of the class. Some nice smiles there.

This information is then embedded in that localized note. So I localize that note to the screen here, and the photo's also associated with this. So now, when I go back to the office and download this to the desktop, I can also choose to share this information with any other stakeholders of my project.

The measurement, the note, the photo all get published to ReCap on the web, and you simply send your stakeholders that link. And they can open this up, and they can see the data. They can do their own measurements. But they can also see the notes that you may be highlighting as important for them. That's all available on ReCap for mobile, and it's all part of the ReCap subscription.

So I think we'll maybe flip it back to the other part, and I'll finish off. Right, one more slide.

HEIDI HEWETT: So Mike was talking about things like registration. And he had some terms there where if you're just an AutoCAD user like me, you may not quite know what that means. I know when I started working with point clouds, [INAUDIBLE]. IPad [? quite a few ?] weeks ago, I just got [INAUDIBLE] from ReCap to work with somebody. But I didn't really understand how they got to that point.

So what I want to show you now is how to get that point and what some of these terms, like registration, what that means so you really understand the process from start to finish, OK?

MIKE MIZUNO: [INAUDIBLE]

HEIDI HEWETT: Yes. OK. So processing the point cloud can-- oh, we're clear on--

AUDIENCE: I'm not picking up your mic anymore.

HEIDI HEWETT: Oh. How's that? Is that coming over?

AUDIENCE: You're back.

HEIDI HEWETT: Oh, OK. Thank you. Thank you. Whoops. So hopefully, it's kind of clear. It's super easy, like what Mike said. Taking a scanner, placing it around.

There's some tricks, though, to knowing, like he said-- I mean, it's much easier now, because you can actually see the data in the field. When he was talking about how it could be frustrating previously because you'd be out in the field and then you get back to the office and realize you're missing information, we did a whole bunch of scans up at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado a few years ago. And that's exactly what happened.

It was my first time scanning, and we had over 100 scans, maybe 150. And then when I went to try to register them-- first time ever trying to register them together-- I was missing. I couldn't get the inside linked to the outside.

So had I known, had I understood the process better, my scanning would have been better out there. I would have got the right scans in the right places. So that's why I want to show you the manual process, even though if you have a device like this, it's maybe less important. But it's still good to know so that you're scanning the right information out there.

OK. So there's a whole lot that Autodesk ReCap can do. And most of you probably know that ReCap installs with AutoCAD and most of Autodesk products by default. If you want to do something like registering, which is linking the scans together, you will need the ReCap Pro license, OK?

So there's a lot of other things that you can do. I'm only going to show you just the minimum in here. So let me go ahead and pull up ReCap.

All right. So however you got your data-- let's say you did it like I did. You had it out in a scanner, you put it on an SD card, you take it back to the office now, and you plug it into your computer. And what you want to do is just start a new scan project.

So I'm just going to--

AUDIENCE: We're not seeing your ReCap screen.

HEIDI HEWETT: Oh. Why would that be?

AUDIENCE: So just cancel the PowerPoint presentation.

HEIDI HEWETT: Oh. Oh, because it's projected. Oh, OK.

AUDIENCE: Because of image loading.

HEIDI HEWETT: Thank you.

MIKE MIZUNO: This is why I don't teach live.

HEIDI HEWETT: Yeah? Yes. OK. Thank you. That would have been a long presentation.

OK. So I launched ReCap. And if you just have that new data, you just start a scan project. Give it a name. You tell it where you want those files to be.

This is important to know where those files are going to go, because a lot of this is linked. We're going to create a project, and it's linked to maybe 10, 20, 100, whatever scans that you did. So it's important to know where those files are.

I'm just going to take the defaults here, because I'm not actually going to use this project. But it's really as simple as this. You select the files or the folder that you want to import. If you have more than just a couple scans, it's probably best to choose folder.

Then you can navigate to wherever your scans are. So here, I've got my 3D scans. Actually, that's not my-- I'm not going to navigate there. But wherever the folder is that you copied from your drive, you're going to navigate to that folder. It'll have lots of folders under it with all of those scans, each individual scan.

And as soon as it does that-- now, I'm going to get out of here, because it does take some time to import those files. That's the first part of the process it's going to go through. So what I'm going to do is suspend that project and go back to a project that I had already started where it imported all these, just to save some time.

Now, where did I put that project? Uh-oh, that's a bummer. Sorry. It was on my recent ones, but I must have put it somewhere else, because it's fallen off the Recent. Oh, I can't believe this.

AUDIENCE: So right now, there's no way to pin a project?

HEIDI HEWETT: Oh, I don't know. Is there?

MIKE MIZUNO: Is it recent?

AUDIENCE: In your recent?

MIKE MIZUNO: No, there isn't.

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

MIKE MIZUNO: There's just a [? glossary. ?]

HEIDI HEWETT: Oh, shoot.

AUDIENCE: [? Is ?] [? it ?] the number?

MIKE MIZUNO: Yeah, it's a number.

HEIDI HEWETT: I really have no idea where I put it. It's always been on my Recent until I started messing around.

AUDIENCE: Can you search for [INAUDIBLE]?

MIKE MIZUNO: Would you like me-- I can show some stuff on mobile.

HEIDI HEWETT: Yeah, yeah. Do you want to do that? And I'll try to find-- because I want to show you guys the whole process.

MIKE MIZUNO: Switch the video to eight.

AUDIENCE: Mike, did you mention? What's the working range on the BLK?

MIKE MIZUNO: So the range stated in the specs is about 60 meters.

AUDIENCE: OK.

MIKE MIZUNO: [? Cooperating ?] [? meters ?] around 30 meters [? for mobile use. ?] And it's definitely meant for interior spaces, not necessarily for--

AUDIENCE: Oh, yes.

MIKE MIZUNO: Yeah. Not that it can't work outside. But the [? first ?] one that we were both thinking of, [? Leica and RMS ?] together, was using [INAUDIBLE] create Revit models or floor plans, those kinds of things. Does not say it can't work outside, but it's not made for construction-level projects where you're talking about meters or, in some cases, kilometers in these sort of cases.

AUDIENCE: But if you were going to set up around four sides of a building or something, [? it would scan ?] [? to the ?] [? computer ?] [? app. ?]

MIKE MIZUNO: The fact that it's like an [? orville ?] is something that was meant to hopefully have people when they go on job sites [INAUDIBLE].

AUDIENCE: Well, the Leica [INAUDIBLE]

MIKE MIZUNO: Like I said, they happen to be-- [INAUDIBLE] so 16 [INAUDIBLE].

AUDIENCE: And that's a great compliment to people who--

MIKE MIZUNO: Yes. Exactly. So everything has a different application, right? Different accuracy requirements that you have, different distance measurements you have. And today, the beautiful thing is that there's multiple devices out there from multiple vendors that satisfy each other's different requirements.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, the compliment is that the [? put that ?] under the chair. And match that in with the-- [? jam it ?] [? in. ?] And the approach that Autodesk has taken is that we have a special relationship with Leica and AutoCAD brings [INAUDIBLE] [? least stay ?] for diagnostic to the [? tech ?] [? requirements. ?] ReCap brings in [INAUDIBLE].

AUDIENCE: Do you have your mic on?

HEIDI HEWETT: Oh, no.

MIKE MIZUNO: Sorry about that. So what I wanted to show is the registration that was happening. So I was just about to do the registration when I switched back.

So really quickly, the data is actually streamed back to the iPad device here. So wirelessly, it's streaming back via Wi-Fi connection. And the registration of that third scan that I was taking as I was talking, you can see it right here.

And the merging happened automatically. So the ReCap technologies automatically register stuff together. That's all in the iPad. And so without me having to do any my own manual registration, it's done here for me so that when I get back to the office, I simply plug my iPad into ReCap on the desktop, and my project's ready to go.

If, for some reason, there's a manual registration needed-- I looked at the quality of it, and I saw that it was maybe off a little bit, and that could be for many reasons-- you can go into a manual mode and do the registration there.

AUDIENCE: [? You can't ?] [? export out ?] [INAUDIBLE]

MIKE MIZUNO: You can, yeah.

AUDIENCE: You can?

MIKE MIZUNO: You can. Yeah. Heidi was showing in the new project for ReCap on the desktop, there's a new option there in the latest versions of ReCap that is Download For Mobile Device. And that will download the scans, the photos, and the registration information right from the iPad. So you have a registered point cloud in desktop right away, ready to be exported out to AutoCAD.

And so when I hit Register, and I just say Merge Scan, I now have these three scans together. And I can look at a map view. I can see that I have the coverage. That black hole that I had around right in front of the projector here, you can see that's filled in now. So that's information, again, that's valuable to me, as someone out in the field looking for the quality of the scans I'm taking. How are we doing?

HEIDI HEWETT: Good. Yeah.

MIKE MIZUNO: Good? All right.

AUDIENCE: With ReCap Pro, you do the registration on the desktop. But if you hook up the BLK on that, that's all one thing?

MIKE MIZUNO: The BLK actually comes with a ReCap Pro subscription.

AUDIENCE: OK.

MIKE MIZUNO: Yeah. Packaged up again. Sure.

HEIDI HEWETT: One-year subscription?

MIKE MIZUNO: One year. Yeah. It is a subscription. $40 a month for ReCap Pro on the month, or $300 a year for the subscription. Maybe we'll hold questions till the end, and then-- yeah.

HEIDI HEWETT: OK, great. Thanks, Mike. All right. So just taking you through the process, then. Where we left off is I had started a new project, and then I mentioned how you can either choose Add File or Add Folders. If you have more than a couple files, then I'd suggest Add Folder, assuming you have them all in one folder and then some folders under that.

So this is basically what you would end up with. And you can continue adding them. So each of these, I just selected my main folder that had all these subfolders for each scan that I did. And it went through this process of importing them in. And you see the icon change and give you this image as it's importing them.

And so this has already gone through. I think it was about an hour and a half for me to import all of these, so that's why I didn't want to do it live. But you could continue. If you had additional scans, maybe you did a few more, you can go back out here to adding a file or a folder, and this is the same process. You just navigate out to wherever those original scans are that you copied off your drive. And again, this is a slightly different process than what Mike is showing with the BLK, OK?

All right. So it imports those. And once you've got those in, then you can go to registration. And that's what I really want to show you, because to me, that was the biggest mystery. Until I had done it myself, I didn't understand what that meant.

So there is this auto-register, and I was really impressed. I clicked on this a couple of weeks ago just to see what it did, and I was amazed how well it auto-registers. I mean, it really identifies key points and registers them together really well.

But I still want to show you the manual process this time so that you know what we're talking about and what the auto-register is really doing. OK. So once you've got those imported in, then you go to Register. Again, I would definitely try auto-register, but here, I'm going to just go to manual so you can see the process.

So what it does is it displays all of the scans that you brought in, and you select one of those. And I think I had already selected one. It doesn't matter which one, but one that you think you can then link other scans to. So I just picked one of my scans over here on the left side. And I said, OK, that's going to be my main scan. And from there, I'm going to tell it which other scans to link to.

OK. So here you can see, if I kind of scroll around, this is the position that I was in right here on the steps. OK. And now, what I want to do is find a scan near that, the next one over one direction or another, that I can link that to. So over here. Kind of just seems like I might be able to do this one.

OK. It's further down, but as long as you have some points in common. And ideally, what you'd like to have are three faces, preferably on different planes. That makes it really easy.

And Mike, you jump in and correct me. A lot of this is my experience. So you correct me. We're being recorded. I don't want to be lying.

And you can even see down here, it's searching for a match. Just from what it's finding here, it's trying to find if some of this data matches. But if you do it manually, then what you can do is just find different targets.

So for example, I know, looking here, that this wall right above the door-- so that wall is the same as this wall right here. So notice it puts a green target on each. It's saying, OK, in this image and this image, this scan and this scan, those are the same. And it will go through this process three times.

So I might zoom in here and hopefully pick maybe this roof, slightly different plane, and say those are both matching points. And then let's see. Maybe I guess I could try this wall over here. Maybe under this light, somewhere over there.

Let's see if that finds it. Ah, it found it. So see how it's got the green target in the lower right corner.

So this is what you go through manually. Auto-register is doing that for you. It's going through and doing this all very quickly and automatically.

But it's really good to know this process, because you're moving that scanner around on site. And you don't want to have to go back again, which is why this Leica and the 360 option is great. But you want to be sure that you've captured enough information close enough together with faces that it can relate to each other, OK. So that's why I like kind of showing this manual process.

But I'll go ahead and close this down now. And really, that's all you do. So I have this whole list of scans. And if I was going to do all this manually, I'd go through each one of those and just keep linking them all together. OK.

But let me go ahead and close this one. Suspend that work. It's saving it but suspending it. Now, I'm going to open up another project. So this one. Yeah. All right.

So here, after I got all those scanned in, registered together, now, I can open it in ReCap. And I can see all the detail. I can look around.

If you click on any of these mirror balls, just passing the cursor over, you see the image, the photo that it took. OK. If you click on it, then it places you right there in that location. And that gives you the most accurate display of the points when you're standing in that location. And also, in ReCap, it will automatically put you in that view where you're seeing that photo, that 360-degree photo.

So that's what it's showing there. And you can see that's actually a photo. OK. So just this alone, having the photos, is great. I can't tell you how many times I go back-- oh, what does that look like? What kind of detail that I wouldn't-- even if I was trying to remember details, there are little things like maybe where the light fixture is or that there's some kind of obstruction there that I wouldn't even think of measuring if I was out there trying to scribble it all down by hand.

OK. So really, just kind of the minimal tools that I used for this is to kind of know the display over here. Didn't want to do that. OK. You want to switch between views. Here, I've got a 3D view. If I click on that, it takes me back to my point cloud view. So one was the photo, one is the point cloud.

OK. And then if you go up here to-- actually, I just lost my window. OK. I'm just going to navigate around there. So what I'm most interested in, like for this deck design in the back, is-- what we need to do is remove this tree initially. So there is some cleanup that I had to do. We were having inspections. There was a lot of people around. There were people and trucks and all kinds of stuff in the way.

So what I ended up doing is opening this ReCap project and then cleaning up the drawing. OK. A lot of that, I've already cleaned up. But what we want to do now is get rid of this tree, because we actually had to cut it down in order to design our deck in there.

OK. So just some of the minimum tools as you're navigating around there is to crop away information that you don't need. And it's similar to cropping in xref and AutoCAD. You just select a boundary area, and then you crop away so that you don't see it. It's not getting rid of the data. It's just showing you what you want based on that crop.

So these tools down here are key. And you can either do a window or a fence cropping. I'm just going to start with a basic window, just somewhere around that tree, to get a little focused in. And now, you can crop either inside or outside. I want to clip what's outside. Clip it away. OK. So that cleans it up quite a bit.

Another tool that's handy is the mirror ball. So you can see I've got all these mirror balls, which can get a little confusing. But if you go over here to the second icon for Display settings and then the eyeball, you can see a toggle for mirror balls. It's helpful to just turn those off sometimes.

OK. So I'm just navigating around with my orbit and the tools that you're probably used to from AutoCAD and continuing to use these tools, either fence or window, to just select around that tree area and clip away. Just temporarily clip the outside off. OK. I'm just changing my view, so it's not actually deleting anything.

But now, I really do want to delete that. Now that I've got a good view of the tree, I can use these same selection tools-- so I'm going to use fence instead of window-- and just create a quick fence around the tree points.

OK. And instead of clipping the outside, which is this temporary display, controlling the temporary display, I'm going to choose Delete right here. OK. So if I delete that, then it actually got rid of that tree. All right.

And then I can choose Unclip All. That brings back all those points that I had temporarily clipped away. But the tree is gone, because I deleted it. OK.

So these are just a few of the tools that you can use. It's helpful to know, over here in the lower right corner, if you open up this icon over here, it shows you all the scan locations. So these are each individual scan that I did. And sometimes, like if I'm doing a lot of work here and I don't want to deal with the interior scans, I might just turn those off. OK. So you can just individually turn off scans here. But it kind of just depends what it is you're trying to do, but it's good to know that's there.

All right. So that is just a really quick-- I mean, those are just a few tools. There's a lot more you can do with ReCap, but those are the minimum that I needed to know to get it cleaned up enough so I could take it into AutoCAD and do what I really wanted to do, which was model.

All right. So at that point, you can then save it. And it will come up with this message. I'm just going to give it-- actually, you know what? I'm not going to save it, because that took a little bit of time. But it will prompt you. It will say, do you really want to delete those points?

And then what I did, just to make sure I had my data stored, original data and the new data, is I just saved it as a copy. So that's why it took a while. It copied all those project files over and made a whole copy of it. I just like having my data backed up like that.

OK. Any questions while I'm in ReCap? Because next, actually, we're going to go back over to you, are we? Or you're all done? You're done. OK.

AUDIENCE: And this is ReCap Pro, or is this [? basic desktop? ?]

HEIDI HEWETT: Good question. So the question was, is this ReCap Pro or the basic ReCap? So this is ReCap that's installed with AutoCAD. But for some things like the registration, you need to have the Pro license. It doesn't look much different, but there are-- I think there's icons. If you don't have the Pro license, which I do, there'll be, I think, little icons or something up here.

MIKE MIZUNO: Does it say Pro?

HEIDI HEWETT: Yeah. So it'll have a little indicator that that tool is only available in Pro, but the app itself looks the same. So yeah, good question.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] some measuring tools [INAUDIBLE].

HEIDI HEWETT: Good. Thanks, David. Another question over there?

AUDIENCE: [? How to get ?] ReCap Pro and just ReCap on the same machine so you can switch between them if they have a license or if they don't have a license. [INAUDIBLE]

MIKE MIZUNO: Switch back and forth between the two flavors?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

MIKE MIZUNO: They don't install side by side, so you have to have one version. You can, with credentials, like your Autodesk ID-- if you're logged out, it will default to the free version. So let's say you have an Autodesk ID that's entitled to it. You log in, you have access to all the Pro things. As soon as you log out, it defaults to the free version.

AUDIENCE: But again, [INAUDIBLE]

MIKE MIZUNO: That's probably a different story. Maybe you and I can talk about that afterwards.

HEIDI HEWETT: Good questions.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

HEIDI HEWETT: Just about if you wanted some people on the same machine to be able to either have some have a pro license and some don't.

MIKE MIZUNO: Specifically the network license.

HEIDI HEWETT: With a network license, I think, was the specific question of how that might work.

MIKE MIZUNO: With a shared license, basically. Yeah.

HEIDI HEWETT: Another question back there?

AUDIENCE: Just had a question on ReCap [INAUDIBLE]. Is there an easy way to export this in where it loads into an [INAUDIBLE] file [INAUDIBLE]? It usually ends up taking [INAUDIBLE] we're waiting to export this.

MIKE MIZUNO: So Navisworks has support for the RCP format, which is what you would export from ReCap. But are you asking is there an easier way, or--

AUDIENCE: Or is there-- so maybe it's computer based. But yeah, when we load up a point cloud in the model, it takes a long time for the points to actually generate to the model.

MIKE MIZUNO: It takes a little while. I think the tip I would recommend is there's a unification inside a ReCap. So there's a lot of overlap between these individual scan locations, a lot of duplicated data. And there's a unification step.

So you can do a Save As. And underneath the dropdown in the file dialog, there's a Unification setting. And that will reconcile all the scans together to only have one single point for any given location, and that creates a lightweight point cloud that will have better performance inside of Navisworks.

HEIDI HEWETT: OK. Great. Another question?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

HEIDI HEWETT: Oh, a GPS control point. Yes. I didn't go into that, but yeah.

MIKE MIZUNO: So you can have control points around your project. If you have GPS data with those, you can input those points, basically, into ReCap, and it'll help with the stitching. It'll also change the coordinate system to be exactly what you were surveying. So the short answer is yes. You can add control points.

HEIDI HEWETT: And I think we'll try to mention it again later, but are you going to show that in your hands-on session tomorrow?

MIKE MIZUNO: No, I'm not planning on showing that tomorrow.

HEIDI HEWETT: No, OK. OK.

MIKE MIZUNO: There was a session today where it got shown.

HEIDI HEWETT: Oh, OK. All right. OK. Let's go ahead and move on, then. So do you all feel pretty good about this process so far? You get the scans, you pull it in ReCap. Even if you just use minimal tools, you can clean it up, and then you're ready to take it into AutoCAD.

OK. So let's go ahead and do that. I'm going to close this out and pull up AutoCAD. OK. So here's AutoCAD 2018. And we've had the ability to attach point clouds for quite awhile in AutoCAD, but it has changed a bit over the years. In the more recent releases, you can either attach a ReCap scan file, RCS file, or a ReCap project file, which is basically a collection of scanned files.

So what I'm going to do here is attach the ReCap project file. And the process is very familiar if you've attached any other external files in AutoCAD. So for example, you can use the xref command, or you can come here to Insert Ribbon tab and choose-- you'll see there's a Point Cloud panel if you choose Attach.

And this dialog box is the one that you're probably familiar with from attaching other types of objects, but you just navigate to your point cloud file. I'm going to go ahead and select the one that I created here with the tree gone. Oops.

And this should look very familiar. OK. So it's just like attaching any reference file. I'm just going to go ahead and take the defaults. But again, if you knew an exact location, if you had a GPS point in it, then you can coordinate that using AutoCAD's GPS functionality that it has, as well.