Import / View Autocad .RCP (point cloud) files in VWX

[John Whyte]

Our surveyor is about to send us a .RCP point cloud file which he advises is openable in Autocad ReCap. 

We run VWX 2014 Designer and are all on OSX (a mixture of 10.10.5 and 10.8.5 across different machines). Can a .RCP file be opened in VWX 2014 Designer ? If not can we upgrade to a newer version of VWX which will allow us to, if so which version would we need : 2015,16,17 ?

 

[Art V]

No Vectorworks cannot open .RCP files up in 2016. For 2017 we can't tell until it is released. You could ask if he can send the point cloud file in a different format. If the surveyor can only send a RCP file then you may want to use a text editor to open the RCP file to see if it is basically a text format and remove the RCP file headers and then save as a .txt or .csv file depending on the delimiter used. There are some utilities out there that can convert point cloud files from one format to another so you may want to do a search  for that and see if it can convert an RCP file into something you can use.

3D point cloud files can be imported as point cloud object in VW2016 but not in earlier versions, unless it is a collection of XYZ points, and then you could do with a delimited text file to generate a DTM.

[rDesign]

Autodesk Recap files (with an .RCP extension) are a proprietary file format, and are likely to be only readable in Autodesk products.

Ask your surveyor to send you the point cloud file in one of the other point cloud file formats that Vw2016 can read: .laz, .las, .pts, .e57, and .xyz file formats.

Note: The ability to import point cloud files was introduced in Vectorworks 2016, so you will have to upgrade to at least 2016. (Or you could wait several weeks and get 2017).

Edited September 5, 2016 by rDesign