Anders Blomberg

So we ended up using photogrammetry in a recent project I did which turned out really cool I think. I had the surveyor send up a drone from which he created a DTM via photogrammetry and an orthomosaic Geo-TIFF photo. As I'm still trying out new stuff I didn't really know what to ask for but he ended up exporting a DWG TIN model from which I could create my own site model in VW and drape it with the ortho as a texture. It's all geolocated and everything so I'm all happy. I guess this might be basic stuff to many of you but it was exciting to me so I thought I might just share it. Skärminspelning 2022-05-20 kl. 11.28.39.mov

Some more development ideas: Ability to change the size/look of the slope arrow. It quickly becomes chaotic when working in tighter areas, as seen in the picture below. I often do grading 2D only and on sheet layers/printed drawings I typically only want to show a + symbol with the associated elevation. Currently I can't turn off both "show slope value" and "draw line" to show just the elevation value, and I won't get the + symbol. A great feature that might seem silly but many find really useful in Novapoint is the ability to change the point elevation up and down with the scroll wheel. Together with the related interactive slope values this makes it super fast to tweak elevations in detail. Would love to see this integrated in VW.

My plants in array are behaving weird. Anyone else recognise this behaviour? I'm looking to show the plants as a filled area as they are before I edit the path but the looks suddenly change for some forms and shows all individual plants which is a little to much to my eye. Anyone knows the reason for this and perhaps a workaround? Perhaps @Katarina Ollikainen would know the answer? Skärminspelning 2022-05-02 kl. 11.54.14.mov

Don't know if it's a different thing in 2022 but I'm getting different locations on imported/exported geometry that is set to be georeferenced depending on if I've set the user origin to the internal or the georeferenced coordinate system. To my mind the point of georeferencing should be a common location that is non-dependant on the respective user origins but I must say that I've struggled with the georeferencing since I started in VW. I typically deal with lots of other consultants/files so I've spent endless hours on this issue and I still get unexpected results. I was planning to do some structured trials with the georeferencing for my own understanding and to open up a discussion about it but work keeps getting in the way 🙂

Yes, I created 2 separate shuttle files with correct/incorrect positions respectively. Linked them into my main project file och manually dragged the cloud with the incorrect position to match the cloud in the correct position. I believe I got it within a few cm.

@Tom W. Just ran into this issue. Would you have any ideas of how to correctly position the point cloud without the helpful surveyor? I tried to manually drag/match the full (but not geolocated) cloud to the striped (but correctly geolocated) cloud but it really isn't a very good method 🙂

@DomC Wonderful! I'll give this a try when I have the time!

Looked into this a little more today and it seems Apple has released a new API for photogrammetry called object capture. I tried a super simple software called PhotoCatch with the same set of photos that the VW cloud couldn't make sense of and it did produce something decent I must say. I guess the plant, placed on a highly reflective surface, is a really complex object to scan so I'm rather impressed. I exported from PhotoCatch in an OBJ format and imported into VW. Looks as below. Just took a couple of minutes. Skärminspelning 2022-03-28 kl. 13.30.14.mov Hedera.vwx

@Chris Busch how are you getting along with this? Do I understand this correctly that I can't create hybrid symbols if I don't know Python or Vectorscript? I enjoy fiddling around in Marionette and I'd love to learn how to create hybrids.

Great to hear your results @Benson Shaw! My trials with the VW cloud were ranging from ≈20 - ≈50 JPEGs taken with my iPhones standard camera app and uploaded to the cloud services via the the finder-folder. So I didn't really aim for either an upper or lower threshold, just what seemed reasonable. Items were ranging from simple, like a couple of coloured pens, to very complex, like a potted English ivy.

@Benson Shaw Did you manage to get something out of the cloud eventually? I've tried a handful of photo sets without luck. I noticed this statement in the guidelines: "Currently, the algorithm is not optimized for 360-degree (wrap-around) views of an object. ", sounds a little weird to me but I tried a few sets without 360 wrap and that didn't get me anywhere either.

The slope symbol can automatically be generated along with a 3D-surface in both Civil 3D and Novapoint. It's one process, defined be exact parameters, that's the whole point. So it's not by jumping through any hoops, don't know why you'd assume that? In VW I'm currently drawing the pattern by hand.

I'm happy to further the discussion and I hope I still have lot's to learn in the software! I would love to be proved wrong about this and would love to see a nice workflow for modelling a graded surface. I guess I could elaborate a little on what I would want to call it professional. Ability to exactly model/grade according to set parameters. An efficient workflow. I have not completely given up on the first point and currently have my hopes in Marionette, although I'm not very optimistic about it. For the second point I don't see that we're anywhere near an efficient workflow. My workflow for the model created above is basically: Grade the site using the grade tool in 2D. Lay out geometry such as NURBS, polylines etc in 3D to try and build up the final grade. Walls and curbs created using wall tool and extrude along path. Put geometry in Site/DTM class and update the site. Define landscape areas to let them follow proposed site. Lay out grades/+elevations needed for the paper drawing deliveries as stakes. This was the recommended workflow from a pragmatic VW-employee and I haven't seen any workflow that is better for achieving the results wanted. The workflow is tedious and not very exact. One problem is the horrific triangulation I get from the NURBS, as seen below. Making changes to the model is not very smooth either and the typical design process normally requires a lot of iterations so this should be taken into account. There really should be much more dedicated tools for this. I do agree that you should expect a couple of hundred of hours to get into a new complex software like this, but I don't even see the tools to learn in VW. I can only speak for how we work in Sweden but I also miss some basic symbols tied to grading. Mainly the slope symbol shown below. These define the sloped area from a (possibly also sloped) break line to another break line (often current soil) and I typically want to define the slope as perhaps 1:3. The slopes are tied to costs for the contractor as the cut/fill will vary with the slope and the geotechnical properties of the soil might also demand different slopes. So this is vital for a professional looking drawing, and I currently don't see any tools for this. I realise symbols might vary with national standards so I do understand that it's tough for VW to provide for everyone but we are used to it from other softwares. Answering my client that my current software doesn't support the standards is pretty much asking to get kicked out ot the project. Lots to say on this topic and happy to keep the discussion going!

I don't know if it would help but I'm running Clean my Mac and it has a little button for freeing up RAM. Maybe worth a try?