From the course: Learning FARO PointSense Plant

PointSense Plant overview

From the course: Learning FARO PointSense Plant

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PointSense Plant overview

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PointSense Plant is a plugin that sits right on top of AutoCAD, and gives us the ability to model on a point cloud. These additional tools allow us to make modifications to the point cloud, such as clipping, sectioning, analysis, fitting, and tracing. So let's take a look at PointSense and take a look at the available features. So first, we're going to open, and we're going to navigate to our Desktop files, Exercise Files, and our Chapter 01_01. And you'll notice, we're in a regular AutoCAD right now. There's nothing different about this, except for, if you look up on top here, we have an additional tab on our ribbon menu called PointSense Plant. So everything that we work on is going to be contained in this area right here. So I'm just going to quickly review the different features that we have. So first off, we have our point clouds. We use this to insert the point cloud. Now, we're going to use the insert, and we're going to bring in RCP files. So just so that you understand that we have to use Autodesk ReCap files when we bring a point cloud into AutoCAD now. We do have an import tab here. This won't be supported in anything past AutoCAD 2014. We can no longer import any other file type other than ReCap, but it's still on the ribbon menu in case you are using an older version of AutoCAD. We have our Sections area here. This allows us to create sections, views, isolate, create slices on the point cloud. You'll become very familiar with this before the end of the course. Next, we have our Scan navigation, and what Scan navigation does is allows us to actually jump into the point cloud and view the points from the position of each individual scan location. As you'll see as we go through, working with a point cloud in a 3-D view is not always easy to see, so having this Scan navigation feature makes it much easier to see the points in AutoCAD, and to really clarify the different positions that you're looking at. We have some digitizing tools, native AutoCAD snaps for working the point cloud aren't always great, so there's some additional smart snaps that we've added here that can show you how to extract lines and sections and corners from the point cloud. We also have some additional tools that allow us to rotate (mumbles) UCS, and this allows us to just model in the point cloud without having to worry about things like how to rotate UCS, what plane you're working in. We can use the points to set those planes for us. We're going to be doing a lot of pipes and beams. This is the section right here where we're going to create all of our piping runs. And right beside that, we have a section where we're going to do some algorithms to run, and fit different types of structure steel beams to the point cloud. We're not going to be looking at Clash Detection for this particular course. We're not going to be looking at the Tagging for this. It's a little bit more advanced. We have some additional tools for modeling. We'll be looking at these. These are tools that allow us to fit the plane, do planer analysis, conical analysis, tank analysis. We're not going to be looking at Dimensions. We will be using the Flatten command, and Flatten allows us to take the line work that we do in the point cloud, and bring everything down to a single elevation, whether it's a Zed elevation of zero, or to a specific elevation in a point cloud. The last tab that we have here, we have a place where we get links to the manual. We have some settings, and we have Product Manager. We'll go through these just to show you how to check on your licenses and some help. So now that you've seen where all the different commands and features are, it's time we started working with some point clouds.

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