I'm always looking for an efficient solution to draw and measure architectural features (windows, doors, etc.) from point clouds of buildings, obtained either with an UAV or with a pole.
I tried automatic feature recognition (e.g. PointFuse), but as the cloud is noisy, the extracted features are not accurate enough and/or splitted in too many faces.
I thing manual extraction will better suit my needs: I want to draw the architectural features directly on the cloud to obtain topologically "clean" polygons such as rectangles, volumes, etc.
The latest version of Autocad 2016 and Civil3D 2016 have very intersting functionalties to manage point clouds in such a way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCR95F0Fo88The general workflow is to prepare the original cloud (I'm usually working with .LAS files) in an external application, Recap. It will organise different files to merge these in a .RCP file that can be attached to an Autocad drawing. According to the demo, during this preparation phase, the software will "structure" the cloud, i.e. recognise planes in the structure of the cloud. Recap has a very simple interface, and the parameters for this segmentation does'nt seem to be accessible to the user.
When the cloud is attached to an Autocad (or Civil3D) drawing, I can acess most functionalities such as slicing, automatic recpgnition of features in slices, etc. Snapping on cloud points works well.
Unfortunately, the possibility to modify the local coordinate system ("Dynamic UCS") by snapping on planes identified in the "structured" cloud doesn't work with me. Apparently, no structure was detected during Recap preparation.
I tried with many different Photoscan-generated clouds, and even with "pure" Lidar samples, but the result is always the same.
This functionality of Dynamic UCS would be very useful.
Does anybody already tried this ? Is it a problem with the nature of the data generated by Photoscan ? I'm using .LAS. Will another format be more adequate ? Do I have to clean or reorganise the data in another software ?
Is the problem related to some settings in Autocad ?
Any suggestion will be more than welcome, because I'm sure this possibility to combine large point clouds with a 3D Cad software used widely by architects will be a great asset.
According to the demo, the