imageAutodesk Labs of late has been making hot new technologies available to the design community Today, February 1st, 2011, they released another technology test bed for the area I have been insisting needed a lot of love: Point Cloud Feature Extraction for Civil 3D.

While we had feature extraction for AutoCAD previously, it was not suited to Civil 3D. Now, not only is the application suited for the platform, it’s insanely better than the previous offering. The dumb blob of points just got a serious boost in intelligence and usefulness.

Intelligent Categorization

The Civil 3D Point Cloud Feature Extraction app includes the ability to automatically classify various features, which include:

  • Road feature extraction
  • Point cloud classification
  • Ground surface creation
  • Point cloud segmentation
    Here are some image highlights from the YouTube previews offered by Autodesk Labs:

Road Feature Extraction offers both Curb and Edge extraction, allowing 3D Polylines to be generated easily.

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Classify objects Automatically, or through a selectable sampling of points.

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    Hide or isolate features once classified.

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Segment classified objects individually. Absolutely amazing !!!

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Get Involved in this Technology Preview

    I cannot tell you how cool this is. You have got to see it for yourself, or better yet, install it. Autodesk Labs will be looking for your comments. This toolset is what we need, so PLEASE try this and tell them what you like, don’t like, and what you’d like to add.
    Unfortunately they have really cut us short, and will only offer the Technology Preview until August 1, 2011. I hope by then you should hear some noise from me about these technologies emerging, with a fresh set of enhancements, during the Spring or mid-cycle Subscription Advantage Pack preview.