Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Point Cloud Fix in Revit 2012 Web Update 1

One of the biggest problems that people have had with the new Point Cloud capabilities of Revit 2012 is how it dealt with multiple point clouds inserted into your Revit project.
If you had multiple scans that all were from the same origin, and you inserted them all origin-to-origin, then they would all line up, right? wrong...Some of the problem related to how Revit handled large coordinate values (as you may know, Revit doesn't like it when elements start showing up miles from the model origin). If you inserted a PCG file which was indexed from something where the coordinates were in state-plane (which is not all that uncommon) - Revit would basically reset the coordinates and insert it center-to-center. And then how are you going to insert the next one so that it is consistent?
The answer was supposed to be the third insert option: Auto - Origin to Last Placed (meaning that it would make sure that the origin matched the origin of the previous model). But it didn't work :).

So what's new in 2012 Web Update 1? It works!
Before:


After:



While no one likes to see bugs like this, it's nice to see decent turnaround on it. I had been worried it was going to involve having to re-index all of the PCG files - that would have been bad.

[Editor's Note: Jason Seck just pointed out to me... you might still be annoyed that they haven't addressed the "first cloud" issue... Your first large coordinate cloud is still going to come in Center-to-Center. All they have fixed is the "relative placement" of clouds issues. I think it will be a while before the "first cloud" issue is fixed, because to do that they would need to fix the "two-miles-from-the-origin issue", and that seems like a big one.]

2 comments:

Dave Baldacchino said...

As of Revit 2011, the limitation is now 20 miles, not 2 miles:

http://do-u-revit.blogspot.com/2010/01/2-mile-limitation.html

And it's not relative to the internal origin anymore. Basically as long as everything fits on a 20-mile diameter "platter", life should be good.

Matt Mason said...

Dave,
Very true...
That said - point clouds over a certain size still get put in center-to-center regardless.

(so perhaps it's not exactly tied to the same issue).

-Matt