This isn’t exactly new news, but it was to me. Today I found out we’ve made a very useful component, the Autodesk Reality Solutions SDK, available to the public. This is a C++ library that allows you to read and write Autodesk’s RCP and RCS formats, as well as to create custom plugins for new point cloud definition formats. ADN members can log in today and download the SDK and accompanying samples. Non-members can send an email and get access to it that way.
There’s a particular reason I find this to be important news: it will enable developers to automate the importing of point clouds generated by external systems into AutoCAD. There was a time – from AutoCAD 2011 to 2014, if memory serves me correctly – when it was possible to automate the indexing of a text file containing a series of points, whether created by transcribing data read from Kinect, or perhaps taking points extracted from Photosynth (going back to a time before the availability of ReCap Photo, of…