Using Point Clouds in AutoCAD Civil 3D

BRIAN FLAHERTY: Thank you everybody for coming. My name is Brian Flaherty and this is Mike Harvey. We're here to discuss using Point Clouds in AutoCAD Civil 3D. I hope you all are excited to see what we have to show you as I am being up here.

So just a quick, little note. This is going to be live so I hope I don't mess up too much for you all and we'll get started. So what we wanted to talk about here-- we're going to talk about using Point Clouds in Civil 3D.

We're going to talk a little bit about myself and Mike, who we worked for, what we do. We're going to talk about the collection process-- what type of collections we're going to be doing, what we use to process, what we're using to extract, and then we'll kind of summarize everything towards the end. We will go live with some of our demonstration so you guys can see actually how easy it is to use some of these datasets.

We have a few data sets that we want to show you. One of them is 34 miles of roadway data from mobile We're going to show you the whole strip of data. So there's some good stuff.

A little bit about me-- I work for ESP Associates. We're out of Charlotte, North Carolina, actually Fort Mill. Where We're spread across all the Eastern part of US, with the exception of New Mexico.

We are about 360 folks now. Back in the 2009, when everybody was slow, we were down about 90 folks. And well, we rebuild ourselves back up to about 360 now. And we're still trying to hire. So anybody out there looking for a job, come see me at the end here. Mike, you can talk a little bit about yourself.

MICHAEL HARVEY: Sure. So when I get excited about this stuff, my Bostonian accent comes out even though I don't live there anymore I went to school at Wentworth Institute. I have a degree in civil engineering. I was at Lanceair for 11 years. Joined Leica Geosystems in 2004.

And then I've been doing laser scanning now for over 17 years. So I'm definitely one of the old guys when it comes to laser scanning. Been doing this for a long time. But a little bit about Leica, I mean Leica's been around in some shape or form for a very, very long time. As you can see on the screen there, that we've been around since 1918.

Then, of course, some of you of the old time surveyors may remember the brand named Wild. So there's a great heritage that has come from the Leica Geosystems realm. And also being one of the founding fathers in the laser scanning industry. So it's been a fun ride so far and we're still not done.

BRIAN FLAHERTY: All right. So let's talk about the collection. Right now we're using three different formats to use civil 3D. We have terrestrial LiDAR traditional p40 static scanning. We have mobile LiDAR and we also have our UAV services that we also provide.

With our terrestrial LiDAR we have a C10, we also have a P20, P40-- we actually have a couple C10s. --an HDS7000, and a BLK360, which we will show you. Mike has some great data with the BLK360 that we'll also show you. That we actually fuse together with some of the P40 data. So just a little bit about that.

Our current collection tools for a mobile LiDAR-- we have a Trimble MX8 and we just recently purchased a Riegl system. And we're continuing to upgrade as we speak with our Trimble MX8 as well. We're actually getting ready to upgrade that one.

Our UAS services-- currently we have an MD4-1000. Has a Sony A6300 sensor on it. We are actually looking at a LiDAR unit as well. We're still trying to decide on what system we're going to end up buying. More than likely, it'll be something with RIEGL.

But we also use the Phantom Pro. We really don't use that for collection as far as orthos or toe pose. We use our NDE for 1,000 we use the Phantom pro three more for video inspection type stuff now. And that's mainly because of the clarity in the data that we're getting

So our processing-- most of the stuff that we do or I do for that matter, we do in Civil 3D. As far as deliverables, we delivered it. In Civil 3D. But once we get to the point of working in Civil 3D, we have to go through a few softwares.

And so we get in to Cloudworx, we use that as a tool inside a Civil 3D. We can use ReCap files and JetStream using this Cloudworx program that is, again, an add on for Civil 3D. And that's going to be our main functioning tool that will help us use these point clouds pretty easily.

And to get these JetStream files or ReCap files we normally use Cyclone. Mainly because most of our stuff that we use, our static scanners or terrestrial scanners, are Leica, So it just makes it easier for us to export that out and then we can export that out there's a ReCap or a JetStream file. But most of the stuff, again, we'll be talking about today will be all JetStream files.

Moving on. The extraction-- so a couple of the projects that I wanted to talk about. The Mirabella project is a great UAV acquisition. We recently did that about two weeks ago. I can talk a little bit more about that project and why we did that. We had a Carowinds.

Carowinds is a pretty large-- we'll call it a amusement park right next to our office. We've done a lot of upgrades for them. And one of the reasons why we went out here for this particular project is we already surveyed it.

We got a brand new P40 year and a half ago. And we wanted to check the data and see how well our survey was to the scanning. And you'll have a great opportunity to see that. Then what I wanted to show you is the I-40. We were contracted by the DOT to basically monitor the rock face along I-40.

There's a tunnel in there that we'll be able to show. And again, that particular project that I'll show you is around 32 miles of roadway data as the crow flies. So it's pretty dense data. And then Mike will be able to give the pleasure of showing a few different projects that he did with the P40.

And one of them is the geosystems office and he actually has some pretty cool scan data up here in the Vegas area. That's going to be pretty good to see. So with that in mind, let's make this happen. Hopefully, if I can turn this-- we'll have to go with this.

MICHAEL HARVEY: Just hit Escape.

BRIAN FLAHERTY: OK, I was going to say. All right, there we go. Sorry about that. All right, so the first project we're going to talk about is Mirabella. The reason why we flew this is that the contractor was having some issues.

We were contracted by Meritage Homes to go out here. They were getting ready to buy these lots from the developer and they were afraid that these pads were way too far back. These are basement pads over here.

They're way too far back. And not only are they way too far back but they were afraid that they're not going to get nine feet of difference between the basement pad elevation and the top. And so the plans called for nine feet.

And not only did they call for nine feet-- and the unfortunate thing about this particular project I had the plan data. And for some reason or another, the background data that I wanted to show you didn't come through. And I didn't want to mess too much with it.

But I feel that you guys can get a lot out of what you can see from this project anyway. So what's nice about this-- this is what most of us surveyors call synthetic Point Cloud because it's not really-- this is all taken from photos and so it's not a true terrestrial LiDAR image. It's coming from our UAV stuff.

So I'm going to kind of move around on here and kind of show you how awesome it is to be able to move in the data. Typically speaking, when you're using this data and Civil 3D, you're not going to be able to move around as easy as we are right in here.

Come through here. One thing that we can do to kind of help start extracting from this they have some nice tools in here. In Cloudworx, we can actually create a points on grid projection I should say. We can do this by a fence.

The first thing they're going to want us to do is put a grid on here so we can actually see it. And again, the data on here-- just so you know, when we survey this stuff I've seen several classes this week where people are flying sites and talking about how great the surface is.

I get scared when I hear that they're only using three or four points. And they're not doing anything to validate that data. I'm a licensed surveyor. I'm not going to give somebody some data that hasn't been validated. So not only do we provide targets to truth our surface and to make sure that it's right but also to make sure that my guys go out there and take validation points.

And all they're doing is taking ground points. And what we'll do is we'll put the CSV file in there and we'll just compare the data. We'll take a point information. We can actually just go over to the side here and get point information and hit a node.

And talking about nodes. Kind of wanted to make sure that I tell this little joke. Somebody made me do this. We can pick our friends. We can pick nodes. But we can't pick our friends nodes. So if you get anything out of this, please remember that.

So we could pick any nodes on here because they're not our friends nodes. And you can get your data on here. And you can see down here any of that data over here. We can come across, we'll bring in our ground points and we'll truth it. Most of our points in here were all less than a tenth.

Obviously, when we get over to the wooded area, we'll have a little bit of a difference. One of the other things that they were having issues with, which ended up working out to our benefit. And again I'll get back to the creating a grid.

One of the other things that they were concerned about is over in here. They weren't really sure whether the water was going to get out. And they feel like they didn't clear enough in this area right here. We were able to actually collect the data on where the silt fence was. We actually overlaid that to the design silt fence and was able to tell them the silt fence is exactly where it needs to be.

They're probably going to need to put a structure in there of some sort or do a tail ditch and modify that or do whatever they need to do. But down in here, with this basement lot in here-- I'll zoom in here a little bit. Close that. And you'll be able to see that there's going to be a little bit of a tough time for them to get that water out of here because of what they have over here.

They got this little tail ditch but it's not going anywhere. So when rain days, they have a little bit of a low spot where they don't get the water out of there. So they're going to have to do a little design changes on here.

And again, this is why Meritage, they don't want to take that lot. They don't take any of those lots that aren't in there because then they're accepting that. And so some of the other things that you could see on here they were concerned about-- the curb lying distance. I think there was a 30 foot setback out here.

And if we do a quick distance on here, you can see that-- sorry. Do my F2 here. You could see that the pad is a little bit further back than they really wanted to. So now they got to get a contractor in there if they accepted those pads to go redo those pads, take out a lot of dirt. That's just way too much.

They want to be able to take those pads and start building on it. So the other thing that we wanted to talk about and show you on this particular project is on the top of bank or on the top of these pads-- and unfortunately, again I wish I really had that CAD file. But if I show you this, let me go back to my top view here. There we go. That's close enough.

One of the things that they wanted to do-- oh, I'm sorry. One of the things they wanted us to do is check the pad elevation as well. Unfortunately, I can tell you that these pads-- this particular pad itself was four feet off.

They were four feet too high. They actually needed to go down a little bit more on there. So there were some more concerns about taking that pad lower but I could do a quick, little line. I'm going to do a quick, little line. So what we can do is-- I usually use a different command so you have to bear with me here. I don't have mine setup like this. No offense, Mike.

So as you can see from the properties over here, we have about seven feet of difference between the top of the pad, which is my end point and the beginning of the pad right here. We get about seven feet in here. And that's not going to work. They need nine feet out there.

So they have some issues out here that they want to deal with. For the most part, the pads fell horizontally along the property lines where they needed to go. But they also have some issues about making sure that from the top of curb to the garage elevation they have enough fall. Maybe not too much fall.

Again, looking at this data when we got this back, it was great to see. The client was really excited to see this. He was happier than anything. So let's go back to the points on grid. Kind of show you a little bit about this. We can do a quick surface on here. We got a little bit of time.

Easy to do. We want to kind of give it a plane. We want to say we want to do a 4 foot grid. Just because we're going to do a one pad in here. And I'm going to fence in the area that I want to do this. So I want to do it really right about in here.

And I'm going to hit Enter and place the points. And shouldn't take too long to go do. We could do the whole site. You can draw some break lines in there. You can do all kinds of great little things to make things work for this. Bear with me here a little bit. I'm thinking outside the box here.

Uh-oh. Here we go. Uh-oh. All right, we're good. Well, we'll just do it on the grid. I was going to draw a brake line for you but for the sake of time, you're all time and my time, we're just going to do a quick surface.

As you can see, we have our little surface in here. I can easily turn off these real quick. Actually, let's do this. There we go. So we have our surface in here. We wanted to change the surface. See it whatever way you want to do it.

Right now I'm going to say that it is a two foot grid. Yeah. Let's go back to one foot. Apply. And if we wanted to change that again, not too bad seeing what we have to do. Let's go back into-- so that's really it about Mirabella.

Kind of wanted to show you guys that. Again, we can always do-- you have your stockpile there. If you wanted to find out how much data you need, you do your volume calculations on that stockpile to see how much she needed to move. Easily can do that.

Actually, I believe, believe it or not, that there is a proposed area for stockpile right there. I don't think it supposed to be 12 feet tall, which I think that's about how tall that was right there. But there was a little bit of a mound that they were proposing there. Probably more for the undercut that they have out there.

So that was Mirabella. I wanted to talk to you guys about the Carowinds project. Remember where that Carowinds was?

MICHAEL HARVEY: Yep. Oops.

BRIAN FLAHERTY: That's it. Thank you. So this is the Carowinds project, once it loads up. We feel located a certain area. There's 140 acres, I think of amusement park out there. And as this has been coming along, we've been out there for about a year and a half now.

And as we started using JetStream inside of Civil 3D, we've actually turned this over to our engineers. Our engineers are using it in the background data from the design. They can actually see things a little bit more detailed than what we normally would do.

So this is the survey that we had. We go into model space. I can bring in the Point Cloud data. And you'll see that it actually falls-- that we set up on the same control that we had. And you'll see we only had two little setups in there as well.

There we go. You'll see that we only had two little setups in there with the P40. And it came in great. So let's see here. This is in feet. And there's our data in the background.

What's nice about this, if you're a surveyor, you're an engineer, or anybody you can easily crop this data out and look at what you really need to see. If you don't want to see the trees in there, you can take the trees out. You could do whatever you really need to do.

You can save those clips. Again, it's great. If we look at this data, you can see that our points fall right where the edge of the wall is. We can come in here and look at this. And this is where I'm afraid of.

On this particular project, for some reason or another, I think it's the CAD file that this survey came out of. Unfortunately, this file crashes sometimes. And it looks like it's doing that right now. Oh, there we go. Live demos.

There we go. It's coming back to life. There's a few tools in here as well that Cloudworx has. If you're, again, a surveyor, you're trying to pick on lines. There's a nice little pick feature in here that really makes it easy to draw.

In the Cloudworx there's a smart pick tool. His setup is a little bit different than mine so you have to bear with me here. So if we're in here and we're trying to draw on something, you'll get the top down view and you'll know if you're on the pavement or if you're on top of the curb.

So you can keep on selecting on there. As you get over here if you get close on there, it's going to tell you whether you're close or whether you're on top. So gotta get on here and get a node here.

Maybe I get about here a little bit further. Sorry about this. There we go. I'm going to put down here so you can see. If you mess up, you can definitely see how well you messed up.

What I'm going to do as well is I'm going to close out this drawing and what I want to do is just bring in this point clod itself without the CAD file in the background. So you can kind of see some of the extraction tools that Cloudworx has as well.

Civil 3D again for the longest time we've had troubles working in point cloud data. When we got this JetStream tool, it really made a difference. And it was an eye opener for us and we're doing a lot more point cloud stuff now on the surveying side of things than we were on the DOT side of things.

We do a lot of stuff with DOT that's another brand we won't talk about here. But this is a great tool. And as a matter of fact, a lot of our DOT folks are now starting to utilize this information. You have a question?

AUDIENCE: Yeah. So JetStream just is a plug-in that handles the LiDAR better or you kind of just dropped that.

BRIAN FLAHERTY: So the question is JetStream is an engine that brings in LiDAR data better or uses LiDAR data better. I don't want to say it uses it better. Maybe a better way to explain it is it's more an ex-reference tool.

So the data is still out there-- I'll say, on your server. And again, in this particular case, we're using it on the desktop. But we can remote into the server and use the data the same way. And it's a great tool to ex-reference in so you're not really using all the computing power that Civil 3D requires.

AUDIENCE: It's a Leica tool?

BRIAN FLAHERTY: It is a Leica tool. Yeah, it is a Leica tool. So again, let me get out of this drawing. We'll look at this data a little bit closer. Doing all right on time.

And again, Mike, he's a pro at it. So he'll be able to show you a lot more things that I can. All right, so let's go zoom to our spot here. And again, we'll get into some of these extraction tools.

And what I definitely want to show you as well we can get in here. There's areas that you may want to concentrate on. Let's just say it's this island right there. We can go in there and click those areas. We can do hide outside.

Just go do a little box like this. Hides everything that's on the outside. Maybe we want to get rid of the tree that's in there. So really, we're just looking at some of the data that we really want to see, which is maybe this little concrete bench that they have right there.

So we'll get back in here. We'll clip some more data in here. Clipping outside. And now we can actually look at this data pretty easily. Move this around. Do whatever we want to do. You can definitely see everything with a little bit more ease.

We can come in here and start drawing what we need to draw. Go back into our smart pick tool. Get in here and pick a node. Not your friends' nodes.

Here we go. I want to draw something down here too. Because what I want to do is-- what I want to be able to show you is that a lot of people have this misconception that just being able to draw right on top of that.

But you really need to make sure you go back to your data, your line work and make sure that you're actually extracting the data you want to do. And in this particular case, we don't want this line to come from the face of curb down to the bottom curb. It's not it's not a handicap parking or handicapped ramp or anything like that.

So what we maybe want to do is just go ahead and move that to where it needs to go, somewhere up in here. And so it's something that you guys should consider why you're doing that.

Many different ways on how you can put in your symbols. Whether you want to put a point in where your light poles are, you can draw in where the benches are. You can put points in where the trees are. There's many different ways you can do that.

I'm a personal believer in the tool box and your tools. I love the tools. A lot of people don't use them. I love them. So this is Carowinds. Wanted to show you that. It's good sized project and I wanted to get back to that as well.

I wanted to make sure you guys knew we're actually collecting data. Everything that we do now at Carowinds is done with our scanners. The idea is, at the end of the day, we're going to be able to provide that client with a point cloud of their whole park.

And all they need to do is use that to design anything that they have out there. What they can do-- if they changed an area, we can go back in there and scan it. Take that old data out. Put the new data in. And now they have a really nice point cloud that they can continue on doing design work with.

The one other thing I wanted to show you so you guys have a better understanding on how easy it's using point data. This is I-40. Gonna open up the I-40 project. It's a US foot.

That's right. I know why that is. All right, so this is the project. If you zoom in here, there's a little tunnel in here. And we can look at that. But as you can see, I'm moving in and out of this project pretty easily. And this is a compressed file of about six gig.

But the raw format, it's about I'll say about 16 gig of a LES file. So it compressed it pretty good. And as you can see, five gig. We're not playing any games with it. It's moving around pretty easily.

And just so you guys know that I'm not trying to pull your leg, I will draw a line from here down to here. And let's just make sure. OK. Properties. Gonna draw in here. Divided by 5280 and hold on. We got a little bit more. That's 316 miles. Oh that's why.

All right. Well, I can assure you that there's something wrong there. But it is 31 miles. It's not 316 miles. I have something else clicked in there, it's making me a liar and I apologize for that.

Good thing about looking into this-- so we have this tunnel on here. Again, you can see how easy I'm moving around 5 gig of data.

Sometimes you may not want to see it in the intensity. We may want to look at it in a different color mapping scheme. Sometimes it's nice to do a gray scale.

If we look at a gray scale, probably looks a little bit better. It's not too bad. But as you can see, this is a tunnel. I'm going to zoom out and we're going to do some clipping here.

And I'll actually clip a little bit more out of here. Let's see here. Actually, let's go clip inside. Because what I want to do is clip out the top of this tunnel right in here. All right.

So now we can see inside this tunnel a little bit easier. Can't get that car out of there but you can see where the curb line is in there. And paint striping-- we can create an easy DTM in there. DOT has what they need. And again, 5 gig of data that we're just moving around like it's nothing. It's a nice little feature.

And at this point, this is where I let Mike do his thing.

MICHAEL HARVEY: All right, thank you. OK. So I'm going to follow that up with we have also a large data set. So there's an another little, small trade show called Hexagon.

And we were here in the summer. And we actually collected some data here in Vegas. We did use our Pegasus mobile mapper. We also used our Backpack. We used our BLK and we used the P40. So there's four sensors in the same set of data that I'm not going to bring in.

So we have tons and tons and tons of data. I think this data set is actually 32 gigs. So as I go to Cloudworx, I'm going to say Open JetStream. As you saw from what we were doing here, just set your units. I'm just going to bring this in.

So now we have a whole bunch of data in here that's all combined. So you can see this is our mobile data. Now as I zoom in here, you see now I have our P40 data and everything is in here, all in the same database.

So now, as you just saw there, we can zoom around nice and easy in here. Not everybody has high end computers. And they're trying to use some point clouds. And usually those types of computers need to struggle a little bit with the graphics.

So we have ability to actually change or adjust the density of the clouds. So if you want to orbit in the entire thing, we can say well, I'm going to just go to low density. And then I'm just going to zoom right around here and just take a look at this. Then, I can zoom up to the area that I want. And then I can go ahead and bring back all the points really quickly.

So the idea behind the JetStream format is all the points, all the time, instead of waiting for any kind of regeneration time. Because clouds are big. They can be heavy. They are graphically taxing.

And of course one of the biggest complaints that we had in the market is it takes forever to re-gen these things. So instead of waiting and waiting and waiting, going and getting five cups of coffee. Instead, you can do your work.

So the other thing that we wanted that I was going to show you guys is the easiest way to actually manipulate some of the UCSes in here. So typically, when you are getting survey data in here, you're getting single points whether it comes from a GPS unit. I don't care who it came from. It's a single point. Or you get a total station data. It's a single point. It doesn't matter. They all work the same.

And then of course laser scanners. Regardless of brand or make, doesn't matter. You've got a point cloud. But the thing is, you have to make that leap from going from a single point, which is really two dimensional, to the three dimensional thing that has space and size. And you need to understand and actually get your head wrapped around how you manipulate inside the 3D space.

So one of those ways is actually changing the UCSes to actually helps you clip down the size of the data so that you can use some of the other tools. So for those that have been around AutoCAD for a long time, and me also being one of them, I always used to like to type in all my commands.

So to change your UCS to the old style, you'd have to say, type "UCS." End for new. Draw a line. And then you say "o," for object. And you'd pick on the end point, hit Enter. And then you say plan. You enter enter. And then you say X the 90 enter. So it's like 15 steps all right It's a pain in the neck.

So now what we can do is we have some of these orientation tools that going to make your life a whole lot easier. So instead of 15 steps, I'm going to say four walls. So now it's going asking you for a floor point. You can see that's asking you right there. So I'm just going to pick right on the node.

Now, it's asking for a wall point. So I'm going to pick right here. So now let's just change the UCS to right here. So now I can say Align my View. And now the view has been aligned to that wall face. So it's the intersection planes, so the wall and the floor.

So now I can go into my clippings. So I'm going to say, clip in the y. And I just want to see just the face of this wall right here. Now again, if I was going to flip this up old style again, now let's UCS, X90, plan, enter enter, right?

So instead we can say elevation view, a line view. And now I can just flip this up and I can start drafting on my surfaces. So that's one way-- it's a nice way of actually manipulating your point clouds in the three space so you can make your drawings a lot quicker.

And then, of course, now you can go right in here and start drafting. It's essentially just going to trace right on here. Now you can click on the nodes if you want. But typically, any kind of fitter or anything like that-- if you zoom in here and you place a line right in the middle of this bunch of clouds, you're doing the exact same thing that a fitter is. So you know that line is going to be survey grade. It's guaranteed, every time.

And then if you want to 3D, that'll allow you to have your 2D lines. Then you can start using AutoCADs push and pull and revolve and all those things to start making your 3D objects, which is kind of cool. OK?

So and then to go back, it's easy. I can say, I want to go back to plain view. I'm gonna go back to a line. And then I can reset my clip. And then all the points come back. So you can do that.

And then, of course, we also have reset the world. And then, of course, you can save UCS too. So once you're saved UCS, then on this dropdown where you have all your UCSes listed, you can actually easily go back and forth between them.

So if you're doing any kind of monitoring report or anything like, that you can go ahead and do that, OK? So the other cool thing in here is we also have-- so I'm going to go ahead and I'm just going to flip this up just a little bit.

Limit boxes. So this limit box is another way of actually clipping your cloud down. So if I had a limit box, if I wanted to go into limit box, I can say my limit box here. And then I can actually type H for height. So if I wanted to say well, I want a limit box that's 50 feet tall. I can say 50 feet tall. So now it's going to clip down to the points that I have there. And then you can start moving this limit box.

So we have another tool inside of our clipping manager. So all the clips that you make-- so whether it be a slice, whether it be a hide, whether it be anything-- you can go into these clipping areas just to manage the point clouds. Because again, the point clouds are big. So you need to have management tools.

So go into My Clipping Manager. And then what I can do is I can right click on this and say Modify. So I get this neat little thing here. And if I wanted to move it, let's say in the x-axis, you can see that I can move my box around and then say Apply. And now the points in that box now get loaded.

So it's just a great way of when I'm instructing people that are using point clouds, especially in a plant industry that have spaghetti little pipes. So it's a lot easier to do a limit box around one area, work on your piping, and just kind of move the box over, and then you just keep going.

Because it's one of the age old questions when you're doing laser scanning is say, well, great. I've now captured 52 gigabytes worth of data in a 1/2 a day. Now what? What do I do with it?

So the easiest thing to do is clip it down to a much smaller size that's manageable and that you can get in there and say, OK. I feel a little more comfortable in there.

And rest assured that you also know, with your clipping tools, you have all the other stuff behind it too. So you just going to whittle it down and go in-- and of course, you can also enable and disable all of your slices. So you can do those types of things there.

So that's a cool tool there. So I'm going to shut off my limit box. Oops, gotta close this first. OK, so now I got this data out of here. So now what we're going to do is I'm gong show you another little tool.

How many people are in here in the AAC market? That draw on walls and all that type of stuff? OK, cool. So if you are in the AutoCAD realm, we have another little tool that's kind of nice that's going to help you draw your lines along walls. Let me find an interesting wall here.

Here we'll go around this tower. So what we got here-- so like the orientation tools, what we can do is we have these auto line fit tools as well. So what we can do is we can either make slices along an intersection of two walls or a slice of the quick slice wall or just along the UCS.

I'm going to use the quick slice wall. So I'm just going to pick on that. Says pick a wall point so I'm just going to pick it right here. Whoops. All right, I'll do right here. Oh, come on. Make a liar of me. There.

So now what it's done is, just like the UCS tool, squared up you're drawing. Because you know, most people like to do your orthogonal lines. So make 90 degrees 90 so you can use your F8 tools. But what you can do is here-- now we have this tiny little slice of these points that we can fly in here.

So now we also can go into our 2D line tools. So if I wanted to actually pick either two points or a single point, I can actually pick on this line point and it's going to start to build our line for us. So now it's going to go ahead and take a best fit portion of that line and start to build your line.

So if I was going to go over here, I'm just going to make believe these lines are connected as such. But as you can see, that the lines now become-- it chamfers as all the lines and it puts them all together for you. And it comes in a polyline.

So inside the same line, you can actually go between lines and arcs. So you can actually, if you have a curved section of the building, go around there that way. So it's a nice easy way to create your lines and to go ahead make your walls. And then again, once your walls are all drawn, do your push and pull you get your 3D lines, which are kind of cool, right?

OK. So the next thing I'm going to show you is I'm going to go into-- as we say, we've got BLK data. So I'm going to go in there so I'm going to close this. And I'm going to go into this drawing.

So this is what I've already done. So this is some of the BLK data. So this is all strictly 100% BLK data. And I do have a clip here. And you can see that I have drawn some the facade on here. And I kind of called these when I was in survey. And these are kind of 2 and 1/2 D.

So I mean, everything's on a single plane on the front face and then of course, you have your floor plans. But all of this stuff through some of the tools that it showed you, the clipping. And then also some are just doing you're UCS tools.

I drew all this in 20 minutes. I mean, it's really simple. I would say just about in all of your companies, you're probably most junior CAD guy, if you put a point cloud in front of them and gave him a UCS, and said trace, they all could do it. So you can get some pretty cool stuff. OK.

And then if you wanted to see the entire cloud, I can say Reset Clip and it goes back here. Now, one of the other tools that I was will show you is sometimes point clouds can be a little bit overbearing.

So some people, when they start getting into Point clouds they're like, whew, that's a lot of data. What do we do with all that stuff? So I need your help of understanding what I'm looking at. So what we can do is we also have this tool called true space.

So true space is going to open up a window into the 3D realm. And then the true space is going to drive the CAD window. So if I said, Open True Space, it's asking me to pick on a cloud.

So I'm just going to pick right here. And then, in this cloud, comes up with this windows. It says, in this general area I have points from a whole bunch of scans. Which one do you want to open? Chances are, it's the top one. So we'll tie the top one, hit OK.

And then what happens is it's going to open up-- you can see I get the little circle of death there. It's going to open up a window into the CAD environment. So it's starting up and it's reading into the JetStream data source.

So now what I can do is I can go ahead and maneuver in this area here and then the CAD file starts to update as you go around. And if you also wanted to go ahead and draw a hint-- so I can go ahead and zoom in here.

And let's say that I was going to start drawing some of this window right here. And I just wanted to do some of that. So what I can do is go over into the CAD area. I can say let's say 3D poly and start a line.