The Autodesk Factory Design Utilities and ReCap - A Great Combination

RUSTY BELCHER: Well, I appreciate everyone being here. Again, we're going to be taking a look at the factory design utilities in Autodesk ReCap and how they are used together to model a facility in context of reality.

One of the things I like about the slide deck this year is they gave you-- I called it the hashtag slide. And you had to try to figure out the sum up your class in one word or one hashtag.

So ReCap and FDU. If I say Factory Design Suite during this presentation, you guys might count and see how many times I say that. I will try my best to say Factory Design Utilities whenever possible. But you guys are in the right class. If you guys use ReCap and you're looking at the factory utilities, you're in the right place.

Reality capture, for the past few years, is, to me it just reminds me of what 3D printers were about five or six years ago. We were just talking about-- did anybody see the Leica BLK360, an entry level scanner for under 20 grand? It's unheard of. So really the market for scanning and high quality scanning is becoming much more affordable. It's something we can all participate in.

Some of the scans you're going to see me use today I created with my cell phone from pictures. The new phones coming out with the dual cameras on the back. Really going to be nice to capture reality and look forward to seeing something about that next year.

But reality capture is commonplace now. It's becoming affordable. And many of us are looking to adopt reality capture in our day to day workflow. So that's what we're here to take a look at today.

Autodesk University 101. You have to have four bullet points to start off your class, We're going to be looking at discovering techniques to clean up the cloud. Once you have the scan, I want to clean it up so that I can utilize it in my downstream applications. Smaller clouds, better performance downstream.

We want to learn how to create drawings from the point cloud. Most everybody always is going to answer that question. How can I use a point cloud to automatically create 2D drawings? All right. I don't have a gold button or an easy button for that, but I want to show you a couple of different techniques that might be able to help you out on that.

I want to use the factory utilities and model a floor or model a layout in context of the point cloud. It's one of the main uses of the application. We're going to take a look at Autodesk Navisworks. We're going to look at Autodesk Inventor. Might even see some AutoCAD in here. If you guys are nice, I might show you some AutoCAD.

And then at the end, my favorite topic of all, actually using point clouds as assets, actually capturing machinery and existing equipment, and then utilizing that downstream as an asset with the factory design utilities. So cleaning and orienting your point cloud.

When it comes to Inventor in AutoCAD, if you're going to put a point cloud into those applications, OK, and you're using the out of the box software, the Autodesk basic software, you're going to have to put your point cloud in ReCap first and then import it into the applications. Inventor only reads ReCap point cloud data. Native AutoCAD out of the box only reads ReCap point cloud data.

Now if you have Leica or Faro applications and software, they have add-ons that allow you to put your point clouds in AutoCAD. I'm not talking about those. I'm talking about the basic applications. So if you're going to use point clouds in Inventor or AutoCAD, you're going to use ReCap. That's the process. It's the workflow for dealing with it.

ReCap can read just about every major point cloud file type that's out there. Faro, Leica, LiDAR, PTS files. Oh my gosh, I haven't seen Top Con. I don't know. E57, xyz files, you guys see the list up here. You can import this raw data into ReCap. So it doesn't matter what scanner you own. You can get the raw data into ReCap. There is a way to get that done.

When it comes to the file types for ReCap, from ReCap on into the Autodesk software, there's a couple. The two major file types you need to understand are RCPs, a ReCap project file, and RCSs, which is a ReCap scan. All right. A ReCap project can consist of many different ReCap scans. All right. You can have plenty of scans in there but one ReCap project file.

Again, you're going into AutoCAD. AutoCAD reads RCP and RCS natively. Inventor reads RCP RCS natively. Navisworks-- Navisworks reads everything. Navisworks has been around for about 20 some odd years. And it's just the nature of Navisworks to read all. So again, if you want to import Faro data into Navisworks, Leica data, ASCII data, even ReCap data, you can import it directly into Navisworks.

So now I want to get started with some applications. I love PowerPoint. I know you guys have not nearly seen enough PowerPoint so far. But I want to show you the applications during the class.

So you guys forgive me. I am going to sit down here. And I want to start off in ReCap. Now, you guys, I'm using ReCap Pro, which is what you'll see on my screen. But I'm going to avoid the pro features.

If you want to learn about registration and some of the more advanced functionality in ReCap Pro, this is going to be not the class for you. I'm not going to delve into that too much. But I do want to concentrate on the aspects of basic ReCap at this point.

Look right on the front page. Leica BLK360. Now you guys bear with me. I'm going to reset my cloud here to the beginning. So this is a portion of a very large cloud.

One of the things you'll see with especially large scans, it helps to divide it up into incremental pieces, deal with it one piece at a time. So this is just one corner of a building. I do have the rest of it and ReCap will open all of it at once. But

For my data set here at Autodesk, I kept it small as I could. So as I zoom in, this is actually a corner of a shop. There's about six different CMC machines in there. There's I believe a CNC CMC lathe at one end, a couple of Haas machines in here. And the overall goal in the next-- what are we together for? 90 minutes.

The overall goal of this class is that we're going to-- we have some new machines that are going to end up on the shop floor. We need to position those. I need to get rid of the machines that are there. I need to arrange the layout drawing for the new machines that are going to take the place of that.

And bless the project manager's heart. He paid to have the floor scanned. I'm looking underneath of this. Every circle is a scanning station. So I see 8 to 12 of those scanning stations. So there are 12 setups to get this cloud. Little circles on the ground are indicative of what the footprint of the shadow of the scanner looks like in a point cloud.

Now back in PowerPoint, our overall goal here is to clean up the cloud and to set the orientation of our coordinate system. So when it comes to cleaning up the cloud, you're talking about reducing the number of points. OK. Anything I can do to bring the point count down means I'm going to have better performance in my software downstream.

So the first thing I want to show you-- I've already shown you this. It's the bounding box or the limit box inside of ReCap. I love this option here to highlight the edges. Right now, I really don't need the roof. All right.

Temporarily, I want to hide the roof data. So as I come down, you'll notice that-- see the highlighted areas? There's the actual roof material. As I come down, I have some structure. If I slow down a little bit, the piping layout becomes-- I can see the piping layout.

There is the electrical cable tray that's running above the machines. See the rectangles and the circles? HVC duct work and lighting. So I want to preserve that stuff. Certainly, if I put a tall machine in here and it hits one of those things, I want to know about it. But I don't need to see it for right now.

And I know you can't see it, but there's also drops for every one of the machines. So I'm going to come down pretty low. As a matter of fact, I'm going to come down low enough that I actually start removing some of the machines.

And I'm going to back up a little bit. I usually back up just to the top of this garage door over there. Now I can confirm that. Now that's hiding points. OK. We haven't-- the file size is exactly the same. We've just hidden the points temporarily.

The next thing I do, typically in a project, is to set my coordinate system. There's no way you're going to set up a laser scanner and it's magically going to align your point cloud to your CAD system's xyz coordinate system. All right. It's never going to happen.

So you can use ReCap to define the coordinate system in your point cloud so that the two line up correctly. Where is 0, 0 in this particular project? That would be another way to think about that.

So the interface with ReCap is purposefully simple. I look at this and I swear it ought to be running on my iPad. There is actually ReCap mobile does run on an iPad. It's not the same thing, but the interface is meant to be as simple as possible.

The Home button takes you out to your main project area. You can save as, and open, and export, and import. There are options for unit control and things of that nature. Help, display.

One of the things that you'll see me do a lot-- typically your point cloud is in perspective mode, which is great. But when I'm designing, none of us design in perspective mode. OK? And I love the way I can come in and basically put reality into orthographic mode so I can look directly down and see orthographically what reality looks like. I love that.

So I'm going to come in and we'll take a look at updating the origin. Now it's already here. So you guys bear with me. I'm going to stick it up here and just hit Enter. I said before it's never where you want it unless you were working-- practicing and left it in that position ahead of time.

So usually your origin is going to be floating a few feet above the floor where the first scanner was. Usually the first scanner, the first station in your cloud, will define the origin. That's typically. So your origin is usually floating above the floor wherever the height of your tripod was.

In this particular case, I want the origin to be in the corner of this garage door. This thing could-- the origin could be anywhere. It could be in the corner of the room. It could be out in the parking lot. Wherever your product, or wherever your project has determined 0,0 to be, it's important that your cloud aligns with that coordinate system.

So I'm going to start the command Update Origin. And the first task is to pick a point. Now I know there's a ton of points here. I'm going to pick one as close to the corner of that door as possible. I know it's hard to see up on that screen with the gray background. But looking on my screen, I can pick it out fairly easily.

Now with this process, read the little tip that appears at the bottom of the screen. What CAD instructor wouldn't tell you to read the prompt, OK. That's CAD instructor 101. Read the prompts. It tells you what to do. If I liked it the way it was, if x, y, and z were oriented already, I could just hit Enter and move on.

But it tells me I can click Tab and then I can go in and individually line up the x, y, and z-axis. Well, the z and the x-axis. y will just be the result of the x and x-axis. You can see that it takes a cluster of points and averages it out to define the vector of z. Now if I were to pick a different cluster of points, you might see z move a little bit.

You want to be careful. I don't want to pick-- I don't want to pick on a welcome mat. I want to make sure I pick points that are right on the concrete floor for that. I like the way z is set up. And one of the things I use orthographically, I'll zoom out and see how the z lines up with the door. I just make sure that it's lining up correctly.

Basically, guys, it's pointing upwards. And honestly, looking at this from the top view, the x-axis looks pretty good as well. The x-axis is riding along that wall fairly well. If you're trying to get this to be perfect, you're wasting your time. You're going to get it as close as possible.

And you'll see later in the presentation I'll show you how to tweak it inside of Inventor. So I like the z-axis. So I'm going to hit the Enter button for that one. Now it's asking me to define the x-axis.

So if you watch the x-axis, if I pick these points back here on this wall, all right, my x-axis, it's not really lined up with the wall anymore. It's a little bit off, not as good as it could be. I have more luck with these points over here.

It's hard to see that. But the x-axis will modify. Lines up a little bit better with the wall that way. So I like that. I'm going to hit Enter to confirm. So it'll take a second and recalculate where the origin is. So now the origin is exactly in the corner of the room where I like it.

So hiding points with the limit box, we covered that. We also covered the orientation, setting up our origin. All of this stuff is in the PowerPoint in the handouts if you guys have your handouts, and you want to take those back and look over that stuff on your leisure. Help yourself with that.

Now I want to delete points. Any point I don't need, all right, I want to get rid of those. Again, the more points I have to deal with-- listen, points in ReCap, Recap doesn't care. Millions of points. ReCap will handle that just fine.

But my goal is to put this stuff into Inventor. Inventor cares. Sorry. Inventor, you have about a 10 million point limit inside of Inventor. And anything I can do to stay under that limit is money in the bank as far as my computer performance goes.

So I want to delete points I don't need. And remember the goal of our project. We're going to rearrange the furniture in this room. We're going to rearrange the machines and the current layout that was in use here.

So one of the main tasks you do in ReCap is clean up your cloud. Get rid of the stuff you don't need. There are a number of ways to select points with ReCap. You have a planar selector, a fence selector, and a window selector.

On the plane selector, you guys remember geometry class? Any three points define a plane. Well, you can pick more than just three points. So go through and select your points. One of the things I've learned, I guess over time, is to pick the points underneath the scanning stations. Those are just good ones to pick.

Pick points in the middle. Make sure you zoom in if you have to. Make sure you're picking on the floor and not over here. There's a mat that sits outside the machine to keep you, I guess, grounded or not allow you to be grounded. So make sure you carefully pick your points.

When I hit Enter after I've picked the points, it makes the selection for me automatically in the plane. The plane has a thickness. Right now it's about two inches, 50 millimeters thick. You can dial that back. I'm going to dial it back to about 25.

That way I don't lose too much of the cloud. But again, as the planes are selected-- let me dial it back up a little bit. That's OK. Once I have them selected, I hit the Delete key and those points are removed.

Not hiding the points. We're actually getting them out of the file. They're still in the source file. This is the raw data, the ReCap. The original scan's still out there. We haven't affected that. But just as far as the project goes, the project's showing fewer points now. So your performance should increase by removing points.

Now in cleaning this up, it really helps to be able to put your model or your reality into orthographic mode. Again, I love having orthographic reality. Orthographic really lines up with the way I deal with CAD. So getting rid of the rest of this, there's a number of ways to do it.

The simplest one is a window selection. So I can come in with a simple window selection, get rid of the majority of these points. So I don't need the machines. I'm going to delete those. There's two columns here. They're hard to pick out right now, but see the I-beam?

There's one. There's another. So I want to get rid of all the points between those two. Over here-- just window selections are just-- I think if you ever used AutoCAD before, you guys know how to do a window selection. So cleaning that stuff up is fairly easy.

Now sometimes you're going to get into a situation where a rectangle or multiple rectangles are not going to cut it. That's where'd you use the fence selection. So I can come in and surgically remove the points that I don't want by tracing a little fence around them. Enter and click Delete. So it doesn't take very long to get the cloud to the state where I'm ready to start thinking about getting this over into my Inventor environment.

Now before I export to get it to Inventor, I am going to reset my bounding box. And talking about getting rid of points or at least having fewer points in the downstream application, there is a lot of points up here in this roof, in the roof material, that I actually don't

need downstream inside of Inventor. So I can use the limit box before export. If I hide the points before I export them, those points will not be exported. So it's another way for you to bring the point count down to a manageable level before you put the cloud into Inventor.

So again, I'm going to go back to my box I love the little option for highlight edges. It just makes it easier for me to see. See all those points right there? I'm going to go just below those and confirm my selection. So on the exported file, again, I probably just got rid of another million points that I don't need downstream.

Something simple like that can really make your downstream performance much better. So this is what I want to see when I get to Inventor. I want to see this cloud with the empty floor. Everything's cleared out. All the equipment's gone. I can start placing my new equipment wherever I think it needs to go.

Just to keep up, all of this is documented in the PowerPoint and the handouts if you guys have those. I showed you the perspective orthographic toggle. Love that. We talked about the fence selection, the plane selection, and removing points.

Now we get to the point of exporting. There's a couple of things you could do. In ReCap, we don't have time to dig into everything. But in ReCap, I have what I call layers. They're called scan regions.

You can go through and select points and declare what that region is. Like I could set up a region that's the roof material. And I could toggle it visually just like a layer on and off. I could have done that with the equipment.

So you can preset your point clouds to have certain layers and turn them on and off if you want to. If you wanted to use that information in Inventor, you would basically be done. You would save your project, your ReCap project file, and you would import the ReCap project to Inventor. Remember Inventor reads RCP files. This is an RCP.

If you wanted to consolidate your work into one single scan, you could export this to an RCS file. That way, all this work-- this could be multiple scams but we want to consolidate it into a single scan. It's called unifying your scan. You can do that if you export to RCS.

So you can export to a ReCap scan file. I have one here called Building Clean. I'm just going to overwrite that. It gives you a warning. Hey, this multiple scans is getting ready to become one scan. And this does take a minute or so for it to calculate it. So this is where I'll do a little dance and tell a little joke. But it doesn't take that long.

Again, keeping your cloud small makes your translations run faster. Divide and conquer is always a great workflow when you're dealing with clouds like this. Only deal with the points you absolutely need, OK? That's the overall goal.

I checked this out yesterday. Everything I've shown you so far is in the basic version of ReCap, the ReCap that comes with your product design collection. I hate to call it the free version, but it's classically what I've always called it. It just comes with the tool. And just about anybody can go up and download it and utilize it.

AUDIENCE: But that's the public version, actually, is this free version.

RUSTY BELCHER: I have seen the older versions of ReCap. If you're on a legacy version, update. OK. Update to the latest version. But on some of the older versions, you can't export to RCS. That's old stuff. So you need to get onto the new versions.

So my point cloud is exported and into our RCS file. You might like RCP better. That's completely up to you. I'm just using RCS for the class. Now I'm going to jump into Inventor.

Again, this goes into my personal preference as to where you put the cloud. Some people will start a new layout with the factory design utilities and they put the cloud in there. That's kind of a classic workflow.

What I've learned here lately is I like to put the cloud in a part file by itself. So I'd like to turn the cloud into just a regular Inventor part file so that it works like every other Inventor part I have. It's the first part I place in my assembly. So that's the way I'm going to do it for this class.

I'm going to go to File, New, going to start a standard part file, get my Inventor warmed up here, and we'll import the cloud. Now before I get started, you don't have to do this. I just want to make a point. I'm going to turn on my x and y-axis. And I also want to turn on the visibility of my 0, 0 point. So I want you to see where that is. There's 0, 0 in the part file.

Now to import a point cloud into Inventor, you go to the Manage tab. That's where you'll find the Attach Point Cloud option. When you select it, here you go. You can import an RCP or an RCS file. That's it. So I'm going to select RCS. We'll bring in our building clean.

Now when it comes in, it's not like a regular Inventor part when you're placing a part in assembly. Usually, you can right click and say place at origin. But basically you just left click to drop it off and then this dialog box will appear to modify your attached data.

So if I select insert at origin, it pops right where I told it to in ReCap. You can also twist it. You can rotate it on the x, y, or z-axis. We'll talk about that coming up. And one of the only places I have ever seen, you can also scale point clouds in Inventor.

All right. That is a really weird thing about scaling. Why would I ever want to scale reality? All right. You will see a little bit later where I can show you why. That's later though. We'll save that. So if I click OK, if I turn this around, you'll see my origin.

My Inventor origin lines up perfectly with the ReCap origin point. So I've got the reality in the XYZ location where I need it for the rest of my CAD data. Now z is up. In Factory Design Utilities, z is the up direction. OK.

In Inventor, what's the up direction? Y'all say it. The y. OK. Why is y the up direction in Inventor? I don't know why. All right. I always say wise up. W-I-S-E-U-P wise up in Inventor. But in the factory utilities, z is up. So I don't want to twist the cloud around. z was up in the cloud and that's fine.

What I can do, just for sanity's sake, I can adjust my view cube. I can set my current view to front. I can align or set up my isometric view or my home view. So I can make the View cube at least display theoretically what is up in front and right and left.

So we've exported our scan. We've imported it into Inventor. Now you would think we're done. I've got reality digitized in my Inventor environment. So now it should be very straightforward to just start dropping in the components.

Inventor is a CAD environment. All right. Computer aided design, computer aided drafting. CAD is a perfect world. If I want to draw a 10 foot line in CAD, I get to draw it to what? 16 decimal places past zero to be perfect.

Reality is never perfect. Look at these nice perfectly vertical walls. Right. This is not vertical. It's a degree or so out. It's not straight. The floor is not level, believe it or not, whether you can feel it or not.

And translating reality into CAD is your-- my responsibility. OK. We need to figure out a way to get good CAD lines from our point cloud before we start moving on and placing furniture or placing equipment in context of the cloud.

Now in years past, I've promoted a number of ways to do this. Every time I've taught this class at AU-- this is like the third or fourth time. And every time I come here I have new ways to trace your point cloud data. I'll show you a couple of them.

Let's see. Videos, point clouds. Let's start with AutoCAD. AutoCAD has a couple of nice tools built into that. You can import your cloud. And if I pause for a minute, check out the cloud I imported. I used the same process you've seen so far, but I took a swath.

I got rid of the roof. I got rid of the floor and just took a swath that locates the walls and the equipment in their current position. The deeper your swath, the easier it is for the software to, quote unquote, "trace the lines" or to section your point cloud. So you don't just-- you don't want a thin section. You want a thick section.

So I set up the cloud in ReCap. I export it and then I open it up inside of AutoCAD. AutoCAD has some nice point cloud tools. They're kind of rudimentary. But one of them allows you to section a point cloud.

The section is not planar. It's a thick section. So again, the thicker your section in AutoCAD, the more points it's going to take into account when it tries to trace it for you.

Get a thick section and then there's a tool up on the point cloud tools that allows you to trace the point cloud. They're called section lines. A single click. I use the ultra low accuracy here so that it works fairly quickly. But now you have polylines where the point cloud was interpreted to be.

If you use this method, you need to understand those clouds are elevated above 0, 0. So you do have to select the clouds, change their elevation, and put them back down to 0, 0. But there is a very primitive trace of your point cloud. That's almost real time with me in AutoCAD on that video, so a couple of minutes and you can trace a cloud that way.

Oh man. I remember in the-- I will say this. In the old Factory Design Suite, all right, I meant to say that one that time, the Raster Design tools were part of the suite.

Hey, is anyone using Raster Design? Does anybody absolutely have to have it? Because I hate to break it to you, Raster Design's not in the collection. It may be in the future, because people may need it. But they decided not to include that this time.

But if you have the Raster Design tools, let me go find the other video here, you can use the Raster Design tools to trace a raster version of your point cloud. So where do you get the raster version from? ReCap.

So in ReCap I take the same swath of points. I set it up to be orthographic. Right. I go to the top view. And see that nice picture right there? That's what I want to capture as an image. A couple of things you can do. If you've ever used the Raster Design tools, you're trying to get a bitonal image, a black and white image.

So one of the things I do-- well, first off, I take a measurement. You need to create an overall measurement here. Very important to the process. It says 63 and 1/2 feet for you guys that are in the back. So I need to have that measurement. A little bit of a stickler for accuracy here, but you need to have that measurement if you're going to use this process.

Typically, what I do is I will select the cloud. When you select the cloud in ReCap, usually it highlights white. I'm going to use that for my advantage here. I can also set the color of the background to dark or black.

So there is my bitonal image. And there is an export image command. So you can simply save this as a PNG file. You import that PNG to AutoCAD. So I'm in AutoCAD. I come in. I've got my black and white image. See it come in here in a second.

And it's typical raster design functionality at this point. Use the raster design tools to insert the image, bring in my black and white footprint, and I'll use the basic tools that come with the Raster Design tools.

We clean up. You go to the Clean Up menu and you find the Invert command. So now you have a transparent background and you can see the white lines. And I use the contour following tools.

I am going to set up a layer for my lines. So bear with me. We'll set up a layer. We'll set that layer to green. And then I'll use the contour following tools to trace the cloud.

Contour following basically traces the pixels and replaces them with a poly line. So it'll remove the pixels after you execute the command. So you basically you just go through and eliminate pixels tracing the point cloud. Not automatic, but it helps you. Instead of you having to draw all the lines yourself, you can have the tool help you.

If you are a raster design expert, you might be saying, hey Rusty, why didn't you clean up the cloud? There are cleanup tools to get rid of all those stray pixels if I wanted to make the lines a little easier to understand and interpret. But for time's sake, I didn't do that. But I'm letting the tool do the tracing for me.

To finish up this process-- we're not done yet. To finish up the process, I have to scale this back up to full scale. That image wasn't full scale. So this is where I'd use the scale command with a reference. So I pick the same two points and I type in the 62 and a 1/2 feet to make the image full scale.

That little accuracy issue right there is enough that some people might not want to do this particular process. But at least the lines are in the ballpark as far as what I scanned. And I've got an AutoCAD layout of that design.

Now, obviously, there's some clean up that needs to be done. I really would recommend that you'd clean this up. That's the next thing I'm going to show you as far as how I handle this. So these are options. 2D lines are necessary.

There's no way you're not going to move on if you don't drop a CAD line in there somewhere. So they are necessary. And I mentioned the two versions, the two ways I cleaned them up with raster design or with the AutoCAD DWG geometry.

So let me show you how I tackle this. And I do my tracing-- I do it manually. It doesn't take a lot to trace a point cloud. Tracing reality is easy. All right. So I'm going to introduce a tool to you. I don't need to see the roof inside of Inventor.

Inventor has a tool called Box Crop that allows me to temporarily hide the points. So I can basically see through the roof. We'll come back and look at this a little bit later closer than this. You'll see me use box crop quite a few times.

So I've got the cloud ready to be traced. I go to my top view. And I'm going to start a new sketch. And I'm going to sketch on the xy plane, which is the top plane.

Now I want you to pay attention to this. This line right here, there's 0, 0, but notice there's about a four inch inset where the door is and then the wall goes over to the right.

So I'm going to draw this line. That's vertical. I'm going to make it as vertical as I can. CAD world, right? We'll go there. And then I'm going to pull over here to the right. And I want to lock it in perpendicular.

Right. So there we go. Man, look how close that was. Not perfect, but it's pretty close. As I look at this, I might want to make it a little closer. I could come in with a second line and trace the wall.

So I don't want this one to be perfect. I want this one to be at an angle. And then I simply would measure the angle. I get a 0.06. Man, that was close. That's not bad. Man, I should just move on. But I really want you guys to see this.

So I know I'm going to delete that line. I don't need that one there. This is a horizontal line. And I want the wall to be right on that line. So what I do is I finish my sketch. I'm going to go to the top view.

In Inventor, here's the point cloud. It shows up in the browser. You can expand this, right click on the cloud, and select Edit Attached data.

So this is where I can tweak the cloud a little bit. I can make the last little tweaks. And I remember what-- I want a negative 0.06. I click OK. That line is right on that wall. So that last little tweak happens in your CAD tool. All right. It doesn't happen in ReCap. We're just not going to be able to get that close inside of ReCap.

But now that I've gotten my first line set up, tracing the rest of the room should be fairly straightforward. I'm going to go back into my sketch. I'm going to start back in my origin point. And I'm basically going to walk around the room.

Now if I had time-- I wish I had all the time in the world. But I'm watching my constraints. That's horizontal line. It's a perpendicular line. So I can come over. I'm just going to do the insides of these walls. I'll come up here vertically. I want to stay vertical.

There's an electrical panel right here. So I'm just going to include that as well. And I can tweak. So if I missed a point down here a little bit, I can tweak that over and drag it around. It stays vertical. I can use my Inventor geometry to my advantage there.

And here for the columns, notice I'm tracking over from a point that's off the screen. Listen, if you know the exact dimension of that column, you could and should type it in here. I'm bypassing that. But if you know what those manual dimensions are, you should be using those.

And I can come over here and track off of this column to locate this one. Maybe you don't know this but you can change the line colors in Inventor. I like that green color for my CAD geometry. So there you go.

Now I've got my CAD lines underneath of the cloud. If I had time-- I will show you guys a little bit later if I have time-- I could draw the outside of the walls and then put a boundary patch between those so that the cloud would actually leave a footprint in my 2D drawings inside of Inventor. I'll show you that a little bit later coming up.

But I'm going to finish my sketch. I'm going to turn off my axis point, my axis lines, and this center point. And I'm going to save my file. I'm going to reach up and click Save.

And I call this building clean with Sketch. So I'm just going to overwrite my existing one. So that's what I call that part file. That's an Inventor part file that has the floor plan and the point cloud in it.

The last thing I would do or really the first thing I would do in my factory project would be to start my layout. So I'm going to use the factory utilities now. When you start the factory utilities, when you start a layout, Inventor gives you a floor. That's why I erased the floor points earlier. I'm going to use the floor that's in the factory utilities.

I'm going to use regular assembly processes. So I'm going to place my building into the assembly. A layout is an Inventor assembly. That's all it really is at its core.

Now that it's on my cursor, I can right click and select place grounded at origin. And it pops right on to the xyz coordinate system. I've got the lines and the point cloud. And we're ready to move on.

So now we've got reality on top of CAD lines. We've addressed the accuracy the best we could. Now we're ready to move forward and lay out our factory floor. Let me catch up in PowerPoint. The other methods of vectorizing your point clouds are available.

There is a method of utilizing what's called a DWG underlay in the tool. So if I had that AutoCAD drawing, I could use that AutoCAD drawing as the DWG underlay and place it in context of my assembly.

To show you that-- and I don't know if you picked up on it earlier, but my original DWG underlay was inverted. It was not in the correct orientation. But I have another one here. So I'm going to bring in this footprint.

Here's the footprint that I created with AutoCAD. I'm going to spin this one a couple of times on the z. Now I'll right click and place it grounded at the origin. That's those AutoCAD lines that I traced with the raster design tools or I sectioned with the AutoCAD point cloud section tool.

So that's the old footprint of the old data. You can have-- you can have more than one set of CAD lines in your project when you need them.

All right. Accuracy. Accuracy is on you. OK. The reality capture-- if you're using a survey quality laser scanner, that scan's going to come out 1 to 1. All right. That's reality. That's what it is.

But the translation of reality into a CAD system is on you. That's where you saw me tweaking the cloud and trying to orient it based on the xy coordinate system and trying to get it is as close as possible.

That footprint-- not the most accurate way to get that footprint, but I addressed the accuracy issues at every step along the way. Check your dimensions. Make sure you're working in the correct scale. Some human analysis and interaction is going to be required.

All right. So now we want to talk about creating the factory in context of the cloud. That's the factory design utilities. We'll pick up using those now.

We want to start laying out the new floor plan with the factory design utilities. So in the factory layout, I'm going to get onto my asset browser. There are tons of equipment and Haas CNC machines available. There are tons of them.

There's a few Haas machines. But as far as CNC equipment, the library is chock full of it. I could navigate to it-- system assets, process equipment, CNC machines, goodness sakes. It's up to you. So most cases with CNC machines, I can find one that's pretty close.

And because there's so many of them, I'm going to rely on my favorites. I've already added a few of them to my favorites here. So the Haas VF6. That's what goes here. And I love the factory design utilities. I can bring my data in. I can snap to those AutoCAD drawings.

Once they snap in place, I can use the reposition command and lock it in position. So these are the two machines that we're going to use to replace these.

All right. I'm going to do the same thing over here just for time's sake. Now I'm just positioning these where I think they need to go. Nothing really concrete yet. We can easily move them a little bit later if we wanted to make a change. Over here, we've got a new lathe coming in, so we're going to take a CNC lathe and we'll place it over here. Very easy to drag these things around and place them where you think they ought to go.