The crayon in question is Crayon Physics Deluxe, —– a cool little program written back in 07 by Petri Purho, that uses artificial physics and virtual crayons to complete levels of an interesting  little game.

I downloaded the original version of the game (pre deluxe) for my four year old daughter back-in-the-day thinking it would be a fun learning tool….but it didn’t take.  I guess four year olds are less interested in physics than I thought……..even if it did involve crayons. Whodathunk?

Maybe it had something to do with the old-school Pink Floydesque soundtrack. One can never be sure….

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When first using 3D design tools such as Autodesk Inventor, I was surprised by the lack of annotation capability in the modeling environment beyond the ‘Engineers Notebook’…

…and I had planned to begin this article with a description of that very same, somewhat lame, Engineers Notebook …….. and how it (if fixed), the 3DA technology, and the Insert Object tool could be used to form a fairly decent model information system in Inventor —–but the mere act of trying to start Engineers Notebook locks up Inventor 2010 on my machine. Go figure.

Old School 3DA

A few years ago, I was tasked with communicating the more intricate details of some very complex marble designs with a vendor in Italy. The drawings we had given them were 2D AutoCAD and MicroStation drawings, and would typically generate numerous calls and emails for clarification, but even with that, there were typically quite a few costly errors.
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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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  It’s been 24 hours, and neither of the files sent to the Project Photofly servers have been returned. Either their server is overloaded with requests, there is a bug in the system, or possibly, I gave them the wrong email address to send the results to. If it were to be an incorrect email, it would have had to have happened twice, and that’s not likely.

 I posted in the Project Photofly discussion group, and with any luck I’ll get an answer today. I can say that from some of the posts there, some of the people are sending over 100 images, which may be overloading what is likely a smallish test system.

 Whatever the case may be, stay tuned, I’ll post an update when I have it.