ReCap and Factory Design Suite—A Great Combination

RUSTY BELCHER: So I want to go ahead and get started. Welcome, you guys. My name is Rusty Belcher. I'm an application engineer. I work with IMAGINiT Technologies. We're a reseller for the Autodesk products. And I specialize a lot in the mechanical and the manufacturing side.

I got my t-shirt down at the store, and I put Inventor on mine. So if you had to pick a tool to represent yourself, I think I'd pick Inventor. For a long time I thought the F stood for Factory Design Suite but apparently it stands for something else-- Fusion.

So today we're going to take a look at point clouds and how you can utilize point clouds in Inventor, with the Factory Design Utilities. I hope you guys will see some stuff today that kind of, resonates with what you've seen with AU this year. How many of you guys have seen a virtual reality presentation this year? Anybody check those out? Anybody put on the headset down on the floor and looked around?

One of the topics that's coming up quite a bit this year is scanning assets for use inside of virtual reality. Now this is the second year I've done this class. We talked about this a lot last year-- about scanning assets for use in your CAD system. So it's kind of neat to come to AU this year and see so many people thinking about going out, capturing reality, and using it in their software package-- whether it's VR, AR, Inventor, your desktop applications-- it's really exciting to see people coming on board with this.

So I hope you guys see some stuff today that-- whether you're a Factory user or not-- whether you're going back and working on factories, it really doesn't matter. I hope you catch on the idea of how to take real world objects, get them into your CAD system, and start generating your classic documents from point clouds. So let's take a look at just the class summary.

I mentioned before of-- reality capture is everywhere now. Reality capture used to be such a very, narrow focused little thing. But now, if you have the Product Design Collection, the Product Design Suite-- you have reality capture tools built into your installation. You have them already. There's so many places to get point clouds now. Has anybody here done a point cloud with your phone yet? Anybody got-- what is it-- 123D Catch? Gone out and taken-- what-- 50 pictures, and submitted it for a mesh. Maybe you can 3D print that thing if you're lucky.

Reality capture is becoming commonplace. I saw a phone down on the floor. Built into the phone is laser scanning-- or capturing capabilities. Very, very impressive. So it's no longer-- you know-- $100,000, $200,000 entry fee to be into the point cloud environment. It's now accessible to everybody. And you want to make use of these reality captures.

Now of course, you guys have been to class. I hope-- I would imagine-- this is your last class at AU. I appreciate you guys being here. I really do. I kind of thought that this place would be empty. They told me that I was the last class and I'm like, well-- the first thing I said was, save the best for last. And then I thought, well no one's going to show up for this. But I'm glad you guys are here.

So you've seen, every class starts off with the four topics that we're going to take a look at through the class. This year-- this is a little bit different than the class I taught last year. There's been a couple of changes in the software and I wanted those to reflect in the class. So we're going to change things up a little bit from last year.

But we want to talk about ReCap. I asked you earlier, how many of you guys are using it? If you haven't used ReCap, I'm going to give you a little introduction to ReCap-- what it's for, why do we need to use that.

We want to take a look at how to create DWG data from a point cloud. I need to take a cross section of a point cloud and get the line work for downstream processes. A lot of ways to do that nowadays.

If you are interested in the Factory Design Utilities and want to take a look at how we can utilize the Factory Design workflow-- to take these assets that we create from reality, into your CAD system-- and what are the benefits of that. And then we'll investigate the possibilities of using a point cloud as a factory asset. It's not possible anymore. It's real-- it's here. It's very commonplace these days to have this conversation with customers.

So Autodesk ReCap. ReCap stands for Reality Capture. I was so pleased to see such a ReCap presence on the floor this year. It seemed like-- whether I was in the civil side on the exhibit floor, the manufacturing side, the civil side, the architectural side-- everybody was talking about scanning and ReCap, and getting that data into their specific CAD system.

I'm going to narrow the focus. I'm here today to talk about the Product Design Collection. So typically, AutoCAD, Inventor, Navisworks-- now-- thank goodness. If you want to use a point cloud in those CAD tools, you have to put the point cloud into ReCap first. And then, take it downstream into your CAD applications.

Think of ReCap as the funnel-- the door-- that allows you to bring reality-captured laser scans into your CAD system. Ages ago, we used to be able to do this right inside of AutoCAD. It didn't matter where the cloud came from-- like FARO or any of the other scanners out there. You could actually register the cloud and compress it, and process it to get it into your CAD application. But that's not the case anymore. You have to bring in the cloud-- through ReCap-- into your CAD applications.

Up here is a little-- this is on the handout, so hopefully if you-- please-- take the opportunity to download the handouts for the class. I know this is hard to read, and you don't want to record this, but these are the file types that are accessible-- the point cloud file types that you can open with AutoCAD. There are two point cloud types you can open with AutoCAD-- A ReCap scan-- an RCS, and a ReCap project-- RCP. And the same thing with Inventor. Those are the only two clouds that you can bring in-- the only two file types.

With Navisworks-- really Navisworks is such a mature product-- it's been around for almost 25, 30 years. It reads clouds from all types of cloud scanning sources-- FARO, LYKO, all of the major scanners out there-- it reads it. If you've ever gone to a presentation on laser scanning-- I'd just about guarantee you-- the people doing the presentations have Navisworks.

If you're new to clouds, they are massive. You're talking a point cloud-- you're talking in the gigabytes of data. So you need a tool to take that massive file, make it work on your computer, and then hopefully clean it up-- make it smaller and smaller-- so that I can go take it and use it in my CAD system. And it won't bog my Inventor, or my AutoCAD, or my Navisworks down-- if I want to use that big file.

And that's where ReCap comes in. So I'm going to sit down and start doing a little work with the applications here. I want to focus on ReCap first-- what's it for. So right off the bat, in most cases you have to clean up your scan.

When you take the laser scanner out, you scan the entire world. And when you bring it back to your office, you just want a little piece of the world that you're interested in-- a piping system, or an HVAC run-- or something along those lines. So you need a very efficient way to get rid of all the points, except for the points you need for your CAD design. That's where Recap comes in.

You also want to orient your design. Everybody knows what a UCS is inside of AutoCAD and Inventor-- right? Well the scanner doesn't know that. When you go out to scan, it just arbitrarily, in the very first scan-- that kind of sets up where the xy and z is for the entire registered scan. You need a way to change the orientation-- that coordinate system for the point cloud-- so that it matches up with the coordinate system in your CAD product. Where is your origin? Which way is the z-axis point? Which way is the x-axis point? ReCap allows you to do that.

There are two ways to get rid of points. You can hide them. If you hide points, your file size is exactly the same. You might pick up some performance on your graphic side because you're not showing the points. But you can also delete points. Let me go through there. Deleting points makes the file smaller. It gives you a little bit more-- better performance on your CAD applications and your computer hardware. So we're going to show you how to hide points and how to delete points as well.

So let's jump into ReCap. Here is one corner of a building. This was a very large scan. You guys have probably seen this scan before. This is an Autodesk scan that they shared with the community, and we all use it to test our processes out. And for me-- thank goodness-- it was a factory. You got a lot of CNC machines in the corner of this building. Now if I were to put the entire building up on my screen, my computer would start to slow down. So I cropped off one corner of the building. It gave me a big performance increase. So it helps me-- ReCap is a great tool to do that-- to segment your scans so that you can work in just the area you need.

Now the premise here today-- what we need to do-- we need to clear this floor of all this machinery. And then we have new machines that we're going to add to the floor. And we need to figure out where to place those to get the most of the space that we have. That's really the benefit-- or the goal-- of the Factory Design Utilities. But we're going to use a reality capture tool to help us out.

So the first thing I'm going to show you in ReCap is the Limit Box. I always call it the bounding box. I think we all kind of remember that-- but it's called the limit box. And I'm going to edit the limit box-- puts a box around the cloud-- and there's some options here.

One of my favorite options is to highlight my edges. Now all you have to do is drag the box down, and you're hiding the points just by shrinking the box. And I need to get below. There's some HVAC duct work above, and I can actually see that in a highlight. So once I get below those ducts-- I can let go-- and that will give me a good view of the floor.

I'm just going to confirm that. And we just hid a great deal of points. We're talking about millions and millions of points we just unloaded temporarily. So we get production-- or you get a performance increase-- on our system. We haven't deleted them. We just hid them. So the file size is still the same.

Now, when you're talking about cleaning up a scan, it's really about getting rid of the points you don't need. A good example of points I don't need is the floor. I'm going to take this into Inventor in a moment-- and in Inventor and Factory Utilities-- they have a floor. So I don't need all of these millions of points that represent the floor here. I want to get rid of those.

So there's a number of selection tools-- you can come down here. And, you guys, bear with me for a second. And I want to restart my ReCap. I don't know why that's doing that. So real quickly, let me edit my bounding box. I don't know why it's not giving me my floor selection. There we go.

All right-- so-- we're going to go to my floor selection. Now with the floor selection, you simply click points that are on the floor. This helps define the plane-- it's called the planar selection. So I'm just picking points that I know are on the floor. I hit the Enter button. Those points are highlighted. You can actually thicken the floor if you want to. And then you can either click Delete on the screen or I can hit the Delete key. And remove those points that way. So we just deleted a great number of points from the file. File size is getting smaller-- more manageable-- easier for me to use downstream.

Now, I also have other selection techniques available. I'm going to change my orientation. Here's something I always wish I could do in reality. I wish I could come in and turn off perspective mode. With point clouds you can actually turn off perspective and put the world in orthographic view. That is a huge benefit for using reality capture. AutoCAD and Inventor-- and all of our CAD systems-- run primarily in orthographic mode.

There are other selection tools. There's a simple window select. Let's see-- I'm going to get rid of a great deal of stuff here. Here's just a little rectangular window selection. Again, I hit the Delete key and that information at those points are removed. Remember, I want to get rid of all of the data here. I've got some columns here. I need to preserve those. There's a support column right here, so let me save that. And get the data over here. And I'm going through this pretty quickly, but you can obviously do a lot better if you have time.

There's also a fence tool. So sometimes a rectangle doesn't cut it. Sometimes you want to come in and create a customized polygon. So we can come down and kind of create a polygon-- can pan around over here-- Enter and Delete. And let me finish up with just a couple of more windows.

It doesn't take long to clean up your scan. You definitely want to take the time to clean up the scan. For time's sake, I want to move on-- I don't want to spend a lot of time doing this-- but I could. I could really get this nice and clean before I move on.

Now I also need to adjust my origin-- my coordinate system. To do that, I'm going to go over here to the Point option and select Update Origin. This one's already set up for me, but if usually, your origin is out in space somewhere. So what you can do-- when you update the origin-- you can come in and select the point. I'm going to pick a point right down here-- usually it's a known point in the corner-- usually it's the corner of the building, or a known spot on the site.

So I'm going to click a point and I'm going to hit the Tab button. Just like in AutoCAD, You have a tooltip that tells you-- kind of prompts you through the process. If I click the Tab button, you can select points to orient your axis. You orient the z-axis first, by clicking points. If I zoom out-- picking more points-- so the average of those points will affect the direction of the z-axis. When you like what you see, you hit Enter.

Now I'm going to select the coordinates-- or the points-- to line up the x-axis. So I happen to know, back here on this back wall, there's some points right over here-- that really do line up the x-axis pretty well. I want to check it from the top view and make sure that it lines up with the wall very nicely. And if you want to change the direction of the x-axis, that's the Alt button. The Alt button will change the direction. But once you get the coordinate system the way you like it, you hit the Enter button-- and have taken the coordinate system, and put it exactly in the scan where you want it.

All right. If I go back to my limit box, I'm going to reset it. So now I have all of the points in the overhead back in place. We're getting ready to export, to send this over to Inventor. And in Inventor, you might want to toggle the overhead on and off. So with ReCap you can set that up ahead of time. Just with a simple window pick, I'm going to select all the points in the overhead. Thank goodness for the orthographic view-- makes that selection very easy.

And we have what are called, Scan Regions. I can come over and click a new region. And I'll call it, Overhead. Just give it a name. If I called it layers, you guys would understand what it is, but they're called Scan Regions. Click OK and those points are in place. And then over here in the navigator. You can come in now-- and turn on the visibility, or turn off the visibility-- of those points, any time you want to.

You can make as many scan Regions as you like. Maybe the machines are a region. Maybe the architectural parts are a region, and the overhead cranes, or the HVACs are different regions. You can use the same techniques to divide your cloud up any way you want.

Now, we finish up by exporting our scan. I will say export-- you can also just save the scan. If this is all you're ever going to do to this scan, you could just save it. But if you need to preserve the original scan for other people to use, you would export the scan.

You can either export it as an RCP-- a Recap Project-- or an RCS-- a Recap Scan. The scan is a standalone file. The project is two files-- the project and the scan-- holds both of those. The regions-- if you want to use the regions inside of Inventor or AutoCAD-- you need to export as a ReCap project. If you just want to use the scan by itself-- with no hidden regions-- just export as an RCS.

Now, I already have this. Just let me reiterate a couple of things. We showed you the orientation of the cloud. We showed you deleting points with the planar method. Orthographic mode-- we showed you how to use orthographic view for your viewing. The fences and the windows for selections. And then finally-- again, in the handouts-- exporting to an RCP or an RCS file.

Now, we want to bring this into Inventor. So inside of Inventor-- I've got my Inventor application up-- and I am using the Factory Design Utilities. Some of you who have just upgraded to the new Product Design Collection-- might be the first time that you now have access to the Factory Design Utilities. You might not have implemented that or installed it-- but there are a lot of advantages to having them. So maybe next year that will be a class I teach, is, Factory Design Utilities for Inventor users. I don't know-- something like that.

So when you start with the Factory Design Utilities-- this is an assembly, that's all it is-- but factories have a floor. The planars object you see-- that's the floor. That's the floor I want to use. That's why I got rid of the points in ReCap. The point clouds-- the Factory Design Utilities were one of the first tools in the Inventor family that could bring in point clouds. I remember-- before Inventor could do it-- the Factory Utilities were primed and ready, and already doing it.

So I'm going to select Attach. And I'm going to go down and select-- I've got this bottom left clean file. It's not the same one I was using, but I just have one ready to go. Now I'm going to bring this in. With the point cloud, the temptation is for you to click and try to drop it perfectly in place. Don't do that. Just click and drop it off. And then there's an option here to insert at the origin. That lines up the origin from ReCap to Inventor. So, see the red axis and the green axis on the floor? That's the origin point. And the cloud lands perfectly where it was supposed to land.

Because the scans in ReCap are always full scale, typically your laser scans are always full scale. We don't have to worry about scale. One to one-- If it's an official, nice laser scanner-- it scans it at one to one. We don't have to worry about scale. I click OK and the cloud is in place-- ready to go.

So now we are ready to proceed with the design-- putting our assets of our machines in place-- to make the most of the limited space we have in the corner of the building. Now, most of the time when I start any factory layout project-- the point cloud is nice. But I like to have a drawing-- a 2D footprint of the building-- that I can put on the floor, so that I can see where things are and I can measure.

I'm an old-time AutoCAD user. I still love my AutoCAD-- I still use it. And the AutoCAD application is certainly part of the Product Design Collection, and a good, solid member of the Factory Design Utilities. So we use AutoCAD a lot in layout design.

Now, what I want to do now-- is I want to utilize my point cloud again-- to create a 2D drawing of the original location of the machines. I want to convert a point cloud to a drawing. A lot of people here at AU want to do that. It's not an-- easy is not the right word-- it's not a straightforward thing to do, because reality and your AutoCAD system are never going to line up.

Does everybody understand? Look at these nice, straight walls. If I were going to draw these walls in AutoCAD, wouldn't you think you'd use a line? But in reality, that's not a line. It's a bunch of splines and curves, and depends on-- up near the roof-- it's different. The walls are actually leaning over-- you can't tell-- but by a small fraction they are.

Hey, reality-- I like to say reality bites-- it really does. It never lines up perfectly with your CAD world. So we want to take a look at a couple of ways to generate drawings of reality-- 2D cross-sections of our point cloud.

Now last year when I taught this class, I had an app on my iPad that did this. And it was an Autodesk app-- it was called Vectorize It. And if you have that app, don't ever delete it-- because Autodesk discontinued it. This is one of the main reasons I had to rewrite this portion of the class.

2D footprints are-- just-- it's a necessary part of the design process. You need them. They're very commonplace. I remember the first time I did this in AutoCAD, where I wanted to model right on top of the drawing. Put the 2D drawing down and model right on top of it-- so I know everything lines up. You still do the same thing with Inventor.

So I need to get my scan-- what I call, ultra-clean. All right? I need to get rid of everything that's not a vertical member in the room. All of the cords, and the overhead ceiling, and anything else that is not part of the footprint that I want-- I need to delete that. So in ReCap-- actually, I have a video to show you this. I also need a measurement. We'll talk about that in a moment.

And then, one of the tools I'm going to use-- kind of new for many of us, actually-- is a very old tool. It's been around for a long time. It's called Raster Design. Anybody here used Raster Design in the past? Way back when-- when we used to draw pencil and ink-- what you could do, is you could scan your pencil and ink drawings, and create images-- TIFF files. When you could import those into AutoCAD as a black and white-- a bi-tonal image-- and you could edit pencil drawings in AutoCAD with Raster Design. You could convert pencil drawings to Vector drawings with Raster Design.

Well, Raster Design-- it's now part of your AutoCAD applications-- it comes with your applications now. And that's what we're going to do. We're going to create a screen shot from our point cloud cross-section, create an image, bring it into AutoCAD, and trace it with the Raster Design utilities.

Now for this-- just for time's sake-- I got a little video. We're going to look at that one. So I'm going to pull this video open and I'm going to walk you through the process. And this is me doing it-- I did this earlier today.

Inside of ReCap-- I get rid of all the stuff at the top, I get rid of all the stuff at the bottom, I clean everything out-- except for the lines that I want. And they're thicker-- all right? It's deep-- this cross section is very deep-- so that the lines are continuous. I need to take a measurement. What we're going to do-- we're going to have to scale this up and down-- to make sure it's full scale. I need a real-world measurement from the length of this wall in the back. That way I can measure that later on and get this thing back to full scale. So this part's very important. 63 and 1/2 feet is what I have there.

So once I have those two things-- in the new version of Recap-- you can actually change the colors of your objects. Now one of the ways you can change colors by selecting-- you've already seen that-- when you select objects they turn white. And then you can now change your background color in ReCap to black. So this gives me that bi-tonal, black and white version of my design.

Do a screen shot-- you can also print now-- you can also save images with ReCap. So you have an image-- a JPEG or a PNG. You jump into AutoCAD. Start your template file-- I'm just an acad.dwt. And then I activate my Raster tools. Come up to the Raster tools and you can start. The Raster tools, actually, consumes a license. It's a separate license but you have it.

You can bring in the image. So we bring it in-- it's a small image. Now I could rubber sheet this and stretch it if I need to-- but the first thing I do is invert the colors. I put it back to black and white. And then now I can start using my Raster tools to trace the footprint. I'm going to start off by making a quick layer-- just something that's not white-- anything. I called it Lines. I made the color green.

Once I have that done-- on the Raster tools, you have all kinds of tools that help you trace pixels. And I'm going to use kind of an automated one-- it's called a Contour Follower. So with the contour follower-- you simply select a white line, hit the Enter button twice-- and it gets rid of the pixels, and replaces it with a line or a polyline. It's up to you. So now, just put this on fast forward. It's just a matter of going through and clicking the lines, and converting those pixels to Vector data. The walls, the machines-- anything-- you can convert anything you'd like.

Now if you're a Raster expert, I could have gone in and despeckled-- all those little extra points that are floating around-- you could despeckle. You can clean up the image and make it a little bit more linear before you do this. I am really underselling the Raster design tools here.

Now, once you finish tracing it-- or converting it-- you have to scale it back up. So now is when you utilize that measurement-- use the Scale command. I use the Reference option. Pick two points, and then I type in the distance-- the 63 and 1/2 feet-- to make this full scale.

And I think the last thing you do-- you have to move the geometry to the correct point in the UCS. So I need to move the geometry from its current location and put it at 0-0 where I expect it to be. So I just do a quick select with the Move command. I pick the point-- remember the point at the garage door-- and I want to put that point at 0.

So now I've got an AutoCAD tracing. I've converted a point cloud-- with the Raster tools-- to a 2D footprint. Now there is another way to do this-- I think a more modern way. And it has to do with the cross-sections of a point cloud inside of AutoCAD. You can actually cross-section a point cloud in AutoCAD. And they don't automatically generate polylines where the cloud interferes with the plane.

So let's take a look at that process. I would imagine you would like this one better. If you're an AutoCAD user-- if you've been using AutoCAD for a while-- this one will seem more, what you're used to. Here's the ReCap file-- we start with the same ReCap file-- we've cleaned it up. And we export this, and we bring it into AutoCAD.

When it's in AutoCAD-- if you select a point cloud in AutoCAD-- you get a context menu for all the point cloud commands. We're going to section the top. And in AutoCAD-- let me pause this right here. You can make a slice-- instead of a single section plane-- you can make a thick slice. The thicker your plane is, the more points are going to be used to generate your polylines. That's why I took a big swath through the point cloud-- initially-- so that I'd have more points inside of AutoCAD to do this next process.

Now, you have to section the polyline first. You've got to do that. Then you can click the cloud and you can go use the next command-- which is the Section Lines. This is the default setting. You could tweak this-- but when you start this, it will calculate it-- and it traces all your lines automatically. Very nice-- very efficient way to do it. It's already full-scale because we took it right from the cloud.

The last thing I do here is I select the geometry and change the elevation. I want to drop the elevation of those polylines to 0-- so that I've got my footprint in AutoCAD ready to go. So there's many different ways to do this. Now I will be honest. This is all nice-- but just about everybody, will eventually have to go in and manually trace the point cloud. In most cases, if you want to be very specific-- and have a line horizontal for that wall, vertical for the wall, or a rectangle for the machine-- you're going to have to do that manually.

The footprints that I just created are a great starting point for me to go in with the rectangle command, or the polyline command, and make those vertical lines-- color them and create different layers, and so on. You still have to trace it manually at some point-- but it can certainly cut down on your process. Yeah?

AUDIENCE: Why would we want to trace your walls [INAUDIBLE] the vertical east, west, north, south-- because you're dealing with the reality that the walls are in a field?

RUSTY BELCHER: Great question. Because I want my world to conform to CAD. I want to deal with that wall as if it was a line. And I'm going to have to figure out-- I hate to say fudge-- but I'm going to have to figure out how that line works with that reality.

AUDIENCE: My clients want us to deal with the imperfectness of their plan, and deal with that--

RUSTY BELCHER: There you go. So at that point you just-- don't trace it-- you just use the tools-- the footprints that we just had. I end up keeping both. I end up having both of them, and you'll see later.

So, back in Inventor. Once I have that done-- the Factory Design Utilities-- they have a tool called DWG Overlay. This allows me to bring in my AutoCAD drawing, and put it right inside of the point cloud. So now I've got my AutoCAD geometry in place. I know where those original machines were. I can now reference that when I'm dropping in the new models-- onto this footprint.

All right-- just mentioned accuracy and laser scans. You need to know the accuracy of your scan. If you have a very impressive $100,000, $200,000, phase-based laser scanner-- you're probably scanning at-- we're talking millimeters of accuracy-- hopefully 1, 1 and 1/2 millimeters within a given distance. You will know that.

If you are out there with your cell phone and snapping a bunch of pictures-- trying to do a photogrammetry scan-- it's not going to be very accurate. You might be within a half of an inch if you're lucky. And there could be major deviations-- we'll talk about later-- based on what you're scanning. So take into account, accuracy.

Remember when I pulled that measurement? That gets to be very critical-- to make sure that the measurement in your scan lines up with the point cloud-- which lines up with your CAD data. Keep that in mind as you work through this process. Don't forget about your accuracy.

Now, next topic is really a factory-centric topic. Now I want to lay out the assets. I want to drop my models-- my 3D models-- in context of the world that we just set up. I want to lay out the facility. This is where the Factory Design Utilities come into play. So, let's see. I'm going to do the little, baker-and-the-cake demo here. I'm going to close this file. And I'm going to open up another one. So I've got a lot of this done already-- so time-wise-- I'm going to delete a couple of these here.

If you're new for Factory Design Suite-- I'll say this-- how many of you guys use Inventor? Anybody here use Inventor? All right. How about AutoCAD-- how many of you guys are AutoCAD users? All right. You guys using AutoCAD a lot-- what would you do to me if I tried to take your blocks away from you, and say, you can no longer use blocks inside of AutoCAD? How many of you would pick up a chair and start throwing it up here? No, you're not taking my blocks away-- because blocks are fundamental to the AutoCAD process. I don't want to draw the stuff every single time. I want to draw it once, and then drop it in place over and over again.

Well my Inventor users-- how do blocks work inside of Inventor? Well Inventor doesn't really have blocks-- does it? The Factory Design Utilities basically bring the 3D-block versions of our workflows to Inventor. I call them assets-- the asset browser here. You can create any model you want, and then drag and drop it into your file whenever you need it. You can have massive libraries of assets, and usually an asset is a 3D model. That's how it usually works.

So the Factory Design Utilities come with thousands of pre-drawn assets. You can take any model you have, currently-- whether it's an AutoCAD model, a SolidWorks model, a Inventor model, hopefully-- and you can convert those to assets. And when I say assets-- if you're an AutoCAD user-- you can think block. It's exactly how I think of it.

I have a favorite category here, and I basically have one of my Haas CNC machines here. So I need to place my asset. How many of you are new to 3D? Anybody here? How many of you guys are 3D users? All right-- mostly everybody. I remember learning 3D. It wasn't the funnest couple of months in my life-- but anybody can do what I'm about to show you.

Here's the asset-- I simply drag it into the file. And then I can snap to my AutoCAD geometry-- there's my snap marker. And as soon as I place it, a little reposition triad appears. This allows me to spin it, or move it up and down. And I can land it right where I want it.

So adding these assets into the file is very, very easy to do. The assets automatically land on the floor. So if I want to move them around-- if I want to reposition them and try these little what-if scenarios-- that's not a problem. So I can move stuff around very freely. I can snap it back to the floor if I need to.

Now there is a great deal of advantage to bringing these assets in context of a reality space. I'm not just bringing these in on the 2D footprint. I'm bringing them in and putting them in the room-- in the reality captured room-- to make sure there's enough clearance in every particular space.

All right. The factory layout process-- the factory layout utilities. They have a number of point cloud tools that are very nice in this particular workflow. Having that cloud there is a great timesaver. Now I'm going to take you through and show you some of the cloud tools that are available in Inventor-- and the factory utilities.

So a couple of them that I really do like-- let's see-- how about the Measure tool? Inside of Inventor, I can go grab a distance. And you'll notice that the distance tool automatically selects planar point clouds. So if I were to tell somebody-- measuring from that edge of the 3D model to this face of the cloud-- that's 118-- right at 119 inches. Do the same thing on the back. From the back, to the back wall-- I can tell you exactly what that distance is. So you can measure to a point cloud-- that's a huge benefit .

Now the cloud plane actually works on its own. Say, for instance, you need a work axis at the corner of the room. You can go to your point cloud tools. We'll talk about the cloud point a little bit later-- but here's the cloud plain. And you can drop a work plane there. I'll drop a work plane here.

And then I'll use the old axis command, right? Where two planes intersect, I have an axis-- so I just dropped an axis that's perfectly in that corner. Now I can measure to that axis if I need to-- to make sure where I'm at in the file. You can also have these work planes show up in the drawing. When you do your documentation, you might need a work plane there that represents that cloud of points. It's a great tool for that.

Here's another one-- this is with an asset. I'm going to go to the asset browser, and I'm going to do a search for a sink. Here's my sink station. So with the Factory Design Utilities-- I have snap types-- and I'm going to turn on Snapping to Cloud. This is a unique feature for the Factory Design Utilities. So when I bring this asset in-- normally assets land on the floor-- but with Snapping to Cloud enabled, I can snap them to the wall.

I can actually put my assets up on a point cloud wall now. And then with the Reposition tool, I can stand these things upright. I find 90 degrees-- I can also just type in 90 degrees if I want to. And then I can-- with the reposition tool-- I can raise and lower it, place it right where I want. So I'm actually dropping a 3D model onto a reality captured wall.

The utilities make that possible. And by the way, that's not possible with raw Inventor. So those utilities add a lot of features that regular Inventor users might want to look into. If you're not a factory designer don't worry. There's still a lot of benefit to having those utilities installed.

Oh goodness sakes-- let's take a look at some other benefits the Factory Design Utilities have. I'm going to open up Navisworks. So let me get my Navisworks started here. I got a little laptop up here. Typically, I don't like to run all my applications at once-- but I'm going to do it for this class.

So while Navisworks is loading, I want to take a look at clash detection. This is a big problem. If you're putting new, digital designs inside of a reality-captured room-- how are you going to handle interference analysis? Usually interference analysis happens between solid bodies. Once they interfere with each other, you can generate an analysis of that particular process. Navisworks allows you to run a clash detection-- or interference analysis-- between point clouds and solid models.

So inside of Navisworks-- let me open up my assembly-- so I've already imported this. There's actually a single command that will take your Inventor files and send them to Navisworks. It's a factory design utility-- it's called Sync to Navisworks. So this stuff comes in-- do you see the point cloud? And the 3D data goes right over to Navisworks at the same time. Usually when I talk about Navisworks, I'm talking about walking through and visually inspecting the space. That's really the major functionality of Navisworks-- is to step inside of the space and investigate this, before you commit to construction.

Anybody here got Google Cardboard? All right. You can render this to Google Cardboard and put it into-- I'm going to say-- virtual reality. It's a virtual space. It's not a walk-through reality-- it's standing in place and looking around-- looks pretty cool. The point clouds don't go across to that render, but everything else does-- so, pretty nice.

But usually that's-- when people talk about Navisworks-- they're talking about this visualization functionality. But another major benefit here is the clash detection. So with the clash detection tools-- again this is a new feature-- many of you are getting this for the first time with the Product Design Collection. This is one of the tools they used to make you pay extra for, but now it's part of the Product Design Collection-- which is fantastic.

So in this particular case-- let's see-- I want to do a test. I'm going to test between all of my solid models-- I select those over here. And I select the point cloud as set two. Now this is a clearance test. It's not a volumetric test-- it's a clearance test.

So I want to know if the cloud ever gets within one inch of a solid body. I run the test-- take a second to calculate that. And I immediately get prompted that, yes, it does. Maybe I overlooked that. Maybe I wasn't paying attention when I dropped this off but, yes, that's-- that's really close.

This is probably an electrical service panel or a junction box. Yeah, I don't want my-- $200,000 Haas Mill-- I don't want the arm to swing over and bump into the junction box. So I need to fix that. When would you like to find this out? When do you want to discover this mistake? Do you want to discover it now while it's a digital prototype? Or, do you want to discover it during construction-- after you've drilled the anchor bolts into the concrete slab, and you're putting the machine in place-- and somebody says, hey, this doesn't look right. What are we going to do?