Add some basic civil-design features

[dgorsman]

Point cloud development has been centralized into a single team, which overall, to quote a certain TV personality "is a good thing".  While this has expanded the use of point clouds to many fields, civil designers are kind of being left behind in favor of other disciplines (mostly architectural engineering and visualization).

To that end I'd like to promote making ReCap a little more friendly as a front-end for civil work, primarily in the area of ground surface reconstruction.  I realize there is a point cloud => ReCap => Infraworks => Civil3D work process already available, and that's great for the typical project started off with Infraworks proposals.  What I'm asking for is a simpler, more streamlined process for those who don't need such a full-featured workflow.  It would work to restore at least some of the point cloud features lost in the recent Civil3D releases, if not in Civil3D itself then at least in the ReCap product.

Here's a few of the threads which spawned this request:

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/autocad-civil-3d-forum/c3d-2018-create-point-cloud-no-longer-supporte...

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/autocad-civil-3d-ideas/distribute-calculations-to-all-the-cpu-cores/i...

I'll also tag in @BlackBox_, @Neilw_05, and @tcorey from those threads, as they can give a much better idea of what would be an ideal workflow.  I'll just ask that they keep a somewhat open mind that ReCap will likely stay as the common front-end for all point cloud work, not just Civil3D.

[BlackBox_]

1+

This is a great request, and one that would help my daily Civil design work immensely.

If Autodesk wants to introduce dependency on their new schnazzy ReCap app, that's fine by me.

In the event this needed stating - ReCap is NOT yet a Professional design tool - it doesn't even support Imperial without having to manually scale a Photo to Surface result, and requires cloudy-credits to even download a surface file format compatible with Civil 3D, even though I'm on AEC Collection Subscription. #CmonMan

If we're going to be dependent on ReCap for all things point clouds, then I fully expect for the non-Photo to Surface tasks be accessible to Civil 3D natively - all of the Point Cloud-related tools were there, inside Civil 3D, so just modify them to instead call ReCap with silent switches in a separate thread/process to do the deed, and then silently call Civil 3D's native import functionality (for the resultant file created) without raising events in Civil 3D's main application window.  Lemon squeezy.

We're all pretty reasonable out here in the real world, so it's really not that hard to introduce a new dependency like this in a mutually beneficial way - keep screwing users over like you have with this already, and we'll stop using your ReCrappy tool, in favor of a well done utility: http://dotsoft.com/blog/?p=508

I'd like to add this thread to the mix, which demonstrates that something really does need to be done, and soon, as Civil 3D 2018 introduces the 'mystery of the replicating +65 MB MMS file', which I suspect is loosely related (please correct me where I am wrong):

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/autocad-civil-3d-forum/civil-3d-2018-surfaces-mms-files/td-p/7584597

Cheers

[JamesMaeding]

and rather than reinvent the features, just copy them from VisionLidar, Virtual Surveyor, Carlson Point Cloud, Cyclone, LASTools and more.

You are way late to the game Autodesk, and then you force us through this recap thing which above all, takes 10x longer to read scans than anything else.

Oh, and drop the sesame street picture interface of Recap, in favor of ANYTHING - ribbon, toolbars, just pick something.

Whoever decided the more crypitic the interface, the better, should be "divested" by Andrew so we can get back to decent programming practices.

[dgorsman]

Straight-out copying features from other commercial products is rife with IP rights issues though; the legal and management team would look at that idea and just give a flat out "no" just to avoid the potential of legal issues let alone actual ones.  Just look at the chaos caused by "rounded corners" on smart phones...