Reality Solutions Public Roadmap - March 2020

[karthik.nathan]

We are pleased to provide an update to our Public Roadmap for ReCap products and services.

This roadmap may make statements regarding future events and development efforts for our products and services. These statements reflect our current expectations based on what we know today. Our plans are not intended to be a promise or guarantee of future delivery of products, services or features and purchasing decisions should not be made based upon these statements. We do not assume any responsibility to update this roadmap to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the publish date of this roadmap.

We’ve grouped our plans by product:

• ReCap Pro
• ReCap Photo
• ReCap Web
• ReCap SDK

We use colors to keep track of the roadmap details.

In Progress

Planned

RECAP PRO

Scan import performance

Stability improvements

Support for newer scan file formats

Merge projects without re-registration

Create sub-projects from selection

Multi-scan selection in project  navigator

Side-by-side RealView & Overview Map

Compass widget & navigation

Regions performance

Publish to Autodesk Drive

Publish to BIM360

Enhanced scan-to-mesh

RealView file size reduction

The focus for ReCap Pro is to 1) add performance improvements and stability fixes and 2) add high impact feature and feature enhancements that are most frequently requested. In addition to improving scan import and large scan project manipulation (with many regions), we are also fixing defects in RealView PNG export as well as in the snap to walls feature in AutoCAD. For online collaboration workflows, we will be adding support for BIM360 and focus on reducing file sizes to optimize cloud storage. A360 Drive is being retired within the next 8 to 10 months, so migrating to Autodesk Drive (for users without a BIM360 subscription) will also be completed in that time frame.

RECAP PHOTO

Accuracy improvements for some lens distortions

OrthoTIF resolution (GSD) increase

Processing time speed-up

Large scale parallel 3D reconstruction

OrthoTIF resolution is limited by 256 mega-pixels currently. Also, in some cases, the calibration of aerial scenes resulted in suboptimal accuracy required for survey workflows. The immediate priority is to make these couple of pending 3D reconstruction quality and orthoTIF resolution improvements to achieve survey grade accuracy. The focus after achieving survey grade accuracy, is speed and scale. Removing the 1,000 photo limitation while preserving “overnight” processing time frame is something we will be working towards.

RECAP WEB

RealView Autodesk Viewer integration

Move to Autodesk Drive / BIM360 front-end

Autodesk Drive / BIM360 data migration

ReCap Web front-end EOL

Integrating better with other Autodesk products and ecosystem is the focus here. Structured scans published and 3D photo reconstructed meshes are currently only viewable on ReCap Web (https://recap.autodesk.com) and don’t play well with BIM360, Autodesk Drive nor Autodesk Viewer embedded in 3^rd party apps. This is going to be prioritized. First step is adding support for RealView visualization in Autodesk Viewer, which is the viewer in Autodesk Drive, BIM360 and also 3^rd party forge app. Next is moving the ‘scan publish’ and ‘3D photo reconstruction’ features from A360 Drive to Autodesk Drive and BIM360 (users preference). Achieving these will bring us one step closer to visualizing and using reality data with BIM data in BIM360 and Autodesk Drive.

RECAP SDK

ObjectARX integration

Permanent removal of points marked for deletion

Scan import improvements

We are happy to announce that ReCap SDK will be accessible via ObjectARX APIs in AutoCAD 2021. What this means is that AutoCAD plugins will now have access to the same APIs that we released previous in ReCap SDK. Importing & exporting scan projects, spatially filtering and iterating through points to run custom classification algorithms, etc. are workflows that are now possible in 3^rd party AutoCAD plugins. And more APIs to enable more powerful workflows will be added in the future. We also are listening to you! We are adding the most requested APIs and continuing to focus on performance to make your apps run better and faster!

HOW DO I GET INVOLVED?

If you don’t see something listed here, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t on our radar. If you have specific suggestions for ways we can make the product better, we encourage you to submit them to ReCap Ideas.

We will continue to post updates periodically, and your feedback helps!  Let us know what you think.

Thanks!

The Reality Solutions Team

[florian.scheidler]

I am really happy to hear that Autodesk seems to give Recap some love again.

1. What about the Recap Pro for Mobile App? Can we expect any updates for it in the future? I posted some ideas for enhancements here.

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/recap-ideas/recap-pro-for-mobile-enhancements/idi-p/9395766

2. Regions Perfomance in Recap Pro is in my opinion a crucial issue (which unfortunately never has been fixed). The ability to split the scan in to regions, hide those, clean them and then export them is really important for a lot of users. I lost so much time due to the degrading performance of Recap Pro once you clean up to much or use regions.

3. Will there be the possibility to test new features in a Beta on the Autodesk Feedback Community? I would love to get involved.

[marco]

Florian you're not alone. I'm waiting for a ReCap Mobile roadmap/update/infos since late 2017...

[Anonymous]

I see some good stuff listed as "In Progress".  The "Planned" items can not come soon enough.  I am hoping my submitted ideas, support tickets, & forum posts are all covered under "Stability improvements".  I really, really, really, like the two focus items identified for ReCap Pro.

Per my discussion with ReCap support yesterday, I will make sure I have some of my forum posts added to the ideas forum.  Keep up the great work DEV team.  Autodesk needs to multiply your numbers so the planned items are brought to market much sooner.

[pghcivil3d]

Nice! The BIM360 integration and Enhanced Mesh capabilities would be great!  I would also love to see some more advanced point cloud editing tools available in ReCap Pro to eliminate the dependence on other 3rd party applications.

[mlabell]

I feel like this is too little too late. ReCap was a solid product and then went cold on development when the original team all defected from Autodesk. I used to scream loudly from the tree tops as Recap was the best product out there, and even today hard to argue for viewing and file formats it still is superior. Registration in recap and all the requests for inclusion of new registration features are core software functions of Leica and Faro for many years. If the roadmap is to support the hero platforms focus solely on allowing point clouds in bim 360 models, otherwise it’s too late to jump in the registration game. Cintoo is 18-24 months ahead of Autodesk and headed by one of the ex-ReCap product owners at Autodesk.  Cintoo has a roadmap that is 3-4 years ahead of Autodesk and focusing on industry issues rather than interoperability and lack of love updates. Still to this day I cannot even change the colorization of an RCS file in Navisworks. I have been asking this since 2015 version of software and 6 releases later still not around.

[pcasaday]

Need more options for in house processing as opposed to cloud processing. Also scan to mesh is priority. Cloud credits are a sham and are absolutely cost prohibitive.

[Anonymous]

Got an email today from Autodesk, that ReCap Pro Mobile App will be discontinued.

Therefore the only way to get Scanns from the Leica BLK 360 will be to use Leica Software. This is suggested by Autodesk.  So if i have  to buy or rent Leica Software, what sense does ist make, to use ReCap Pro at all. Congratulation Autdesk, your are doing anything to loose your customers.

[jeff_howard1]

Autodesk broke my Recap web portal.  

Right from Autodesk's own post. 

Upcoming changes to ReCap Pro and ReCap Photo 

Starting August 3rd 2020, A360 Drive will transition to read-only mode. This change is part of the retirement of A360 Drive. For more information, please refer to this page. 

How are ReCap Pro users affected? 

ReCap Pro publish and ReCap Photo 3D reconstruction features will continue to work un-affected by the changes to A360 Drive for ReCap Pro paid subscribers and EDU users. 

• There will be no interruption in A360 Drive uploads or downloads when going through the ReCap Pro and ReCap Photo applications. 

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/recap-forum/upcoming-changes-to-recap-pro-and-recap-photo/td-p/968404... 

[jeff_howard1]

Can Autodesk please fix what they have broken before they go out and try new things?

[Rvadey]

Same here. Not able to upload anything.

[Anonymous]

how are you

[jeff_howard1]

So I see that Autodesk is putting Solidworks compatibility above its own Recap software.  What is wrong Autodesk, get your act together and listing to your users on this one.  Fix the Recap online functionality and make it compatible with BIM360. You team has been talking about it for over a year now.

[mlabell]

@jeff_howard1 Just go with Cintoo and call it a day.  They are run by Dominique who led the ReCap team years ago and leapfrogged anything the Reality Solutions team will do with a BIM360 connector.  As an enterprise customer of Autodesk's we saw this coming years ago and recently divested most of our investment in ReCap except for some editing techniques for cutting up scans into smaller chunks. Otherwise it is a file format we reference into hero apps and call it day.