It’s been a busy few days filled with computer crashes  & glitches, email interviews, and a huge amount of hectic modeling  behind-the-scenes on a big fat house model.

Thanks to help from Mark Flayler over at IMAGINiT, the big culprit behind all of the crashing I have been experiencing has been traced to the Autodesk Labs 3DA technology preview… which makes sense I guess. Technology previews are not finished work where most of the buggyness like this is ironed out  before it gets added to a program, or —-in some cases just gets discarded. Think of Labs as a place where the programmers can throw their digital spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. Sometimes you get smacked right in the face, but safe is for sissy’s

 The Make Components Crash Fix

For those of you that have installed the Inventor 3DA technology preview and are experiencing crashing upon using the Make Components command, just go to Tools>Options>Add-Ins, select Inventor 3DA from the list, then uncheck the Load On Startup and the Loaded/Unloaded checkboxes at the bottom of the dialog as shown below…

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In this post I’ll be creating a BIM version of the Pella ThermaStar window (sold at Lowes). You can download the model at the end of the article, or at any time in the BIM section.

I need a model of the new construction version of these windows for a home model I’m working on, and as is usually the case, there is no model available –so one needs to be made.  I need the model to be a fair representation only —reasonably accurate in general looks, but very accurate in the areas where it will interact with other elements of the design. If good fit and good looks are possible without too much additional effort, I’ll likely go that route.

Right off the bat (ever had one of those weeks) I hit a little snag. The excellent little add-in created by Brian Hall of Qube-It no longer works after the Service Packs I installed the other day. I tried uninstall/reinstall, repair, etc., to no avail. Bummer. It is a nice tool that I have used quite a bit since installing. Brian describes the tool and how to get it in the video below. I’m sure it will work in other configurations…

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In yesterdays post on Project Photofly, I promised the next post would be on the Shape Extraction tool, and I gave a little teaser about whether the hack for ACAD 2010 worked…

It didn’t. After following the directions, I could get the Point Cloud tab to show up, but the last step, loading the ShapeExtractionApp.arx file would not take. Look at the command line in the image to the right (click) for details. Also notice the clouds with question marks in place of several icons and the missing Density slider on the Point Cloud panel.

It would have been nice if it had worked as 2010 is the version I own, but I do have a Autodesk Assistance Program version of ACAD 2011 that the technology preview  did install correctly on (I think)….

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During the first attempt at testing the Photofly technology preview, I was met with a server glitch, but in the end, all went well

  I thought one of the biggest problems was with the interface itself. I’m not sure if this is present on all systems, but with dual wide screen monitors, the first of the images (Scenes?) began very far to the right of the interface as shown in the image to the right….

  And there were no scroll bars to slide things over. It wasn’t until I started writing this article that I found out that you need to drag the thumbnails using your cursor, and I would be willing to bet via touch screen as well. Cool, but unexpected.

Creating a Scene

To begin with, I took  a bunch of images of a globe (shown in the image above) at about 10° intervals while walking around the thing. I went around three times at different levels, and wound up with 54 images. I then fired up the Photo Scene Editor…

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 I spent most of this morning playing around with the Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly with nothing to show for my time –so-far.

Early this morning I downloaded and installed the Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly from the Autodesk Labs website. The program is very small, and the download and install were quick and painless.

I had seen a video by Donnie Gladfelter over at thecadgeek yesterday, and decided to re-watch it as a primer before delving into the program myself…

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