Extract walls - AutoCAD Tutorial

- [Instructor] Let's review a few of the key As-Built Functions to see how they would be applied to building workflows. We'll take a look at creating slices, and then we'll revisit the Fit Outline Plan tool to extract some walls. We'll also look at how we can use Virtusurv to just quickly draw some walls from the points. And here we have our scan, so I'm going to just crop this down a little bit, so I'm going to come to my sections, and I'm going to exclude the rectangles to just below the roof line here. Now when you're modeling walls, you want to try and get the best fit to the actual outline of the wall itself. Now if I was to choose a slice further down, you'll see that the doors are in the way, there's radiators, there's furniture, so quite often, choosing the slice closer to the ceiling gives you a much better outline of the building. So let's create our slice, I want to come up to my Slice tool, Define UCS, and I want it parallel to the ground, so I'm going to choose XY. I'm going to pick two points up near the surface, and you'll see, if we look at that, we've got a pretty good view of the room itself. So I'm going to just click on there, to activate the AutoCAD Point Cloud window, change the object color, this scans to object color, and you can see we've got a clear outline of that room. So now we're going to come across to our As-Built Modeler. I'm going to come to the Fit Outline Plan tool. Now let's configure this. We don't want individual lines for this. I'm going to use a two-D polyline because we're going to extrude this and actually model this into three-D, so I'm going to bring that up to be two-D polyline. I'm going to say OK, and now I'm going to pick my points, so we're just going to quickly go around the outside of the building, to get the walls, the shape of these walls here. And there we go. I'm going to close that, and over here we had a little bit off, it just seemed to pick a little bit off, so we can always come down and just move these. These are just polylines, so if you do get a little bit of an odd reading, I think there were some banisters, that may have been what happened, getting in the way there. You can always come down and just realign the points, move that point out just a little bit. Same thing here, and you'll see that's going to give you a little better fit. And I'm going to bring the points from here out a little bit too, and again, it's just AutoCAD. Once you got that initial shape in there, you can go through and make just slight modifications. And there we go. So now that we have that, if we look at our All Points, you can see that we are sitting really high in the Point Cloud here, we're up around the roof. If we want to do a two-D floor plan, what I would do with that is come to As-Built Modeler, and choose my Flatten, and then I would take my polyline that I just created, and I would flatten that down to zero. And that would take me all the way down to zero. So if we wanted to model this, what we can also do is use the Flatten command. So I'm going to take off All Points. Now there's where we have our line, so if we look at the actual line on this one, look at the properties, you'll see we're at zero. And now I'm going to put my All Points back on again. Now what we're going to do is we're going to take that line, and we're going to fit that down to the ground and extrude that line to give us the height of the walls. So again, I'm going to just clip the section of the walls off so that we can see through the ceiling. And I want to be able to pick a clear point from the floor, so using the Flatten tool, I'm going to come to Flatten, I'm going to select the object, I'm going to grab that line, and this time I'm going to choose a point from the drawing. So I'm just going to come down and pick a point somewhere on the floor. And you'll see that line has now dropped right to the floor line. So what we can do is just using AutoCAD Extrude, we can pick that line, and run an extrusion, and then just pick a point on the ceiling. If we change from Wireframe to Shaded or Realistic, you'll see that we've got the outline of that building complete. Now it's just giving you solids, so if you don't want to have the solid, you can just break the line, so I'm going to undo this, and then just somewhere on the line, just make a little break, so that you don't have a complete polyline, will give you a solid, so I'm just going to make a little break here, and now we don't have a solid. I'm going to put my points back on again, and I'm going to do that extrusion now, and you'll see it's a little bit different. And we're going to extrude that to the top here. Now if I put my shading on, you'll see it's just giving me the walls. So if you break that line, just a little bit, you're going to get walls that you can extrude up and get a three-D perimeter or shape of the walls, or if you want to actually do a three-D solid, keep that as a solid polyline and extrude that into an AutoCAD solid. So to do this quickly again using Virtusurv, I'm going to bring up Virtusurv, and we're going to take a look at that. So I have Virtusurv ready to go, I'm going to navigate to my Desktop, Exercise Files, Virtusurv, and we're going to be looking for a house project. Now if I jump into Scan three, you can see that I can see pretty much all that I need to see in the walls around here. I can see all the walls that I would need to model. So I'm going to come across to our Macros, our AutoCAD Macros, and I'm going to do Draw Outline. So what I'm going to do is just by Drawing Outline, I'm going to just pick points on the wall. So I want you to watch what happens inside AutoCAD. I'm going to start over in the corner by this big speaker here. So you'll see that my AutoCAD is starting to draw here. So I'm going to come across, and by picking these points, around the wall, two points on each wall, as long as I'm going in a single direction, the placement doesn't matter, it doesn't have to be in a straight line. So now I can't see the back side on this wall here, so I'm going to jump to this view, and we're going to do the back of the wall now, and we're going to come through and do this little side wall, this little partition wall here. Then I'm going to go back to jump into Scan three again, and I'm going to continue around the room, just picking points until we can't go any further, we can just come around to this side here, and we're back to that one edge here. So again, we can just close that, I'm just going to leave it open, and if we look, we'll see that we've been able to trace the outline of the walls by picking the points. Now we can go through the same process, I'm going to go back to full screen again with my AutoCAD, and we're going to use the Flatten tool, and I'm going to use the same object, and I'm going to flatten it from the drawing, going to pick the point on the ground again, and there we have our two-D plan. Now one last thing I'm going to look at is if we actually look at these angles, so I'm going to come across to AutoCAD Annotate, and just throw some dimensions in on these just so we can see some angles. So these walls are pretty good, actually, not too off of square, but there's always a little bit, this is real world conditions that we're looking at here. So what we can do is take a look at these angles if we want to bring these into square. We can go back to our As-Built Building Plans and use the Align Walls tool. So by looking at this Align Walls tool, we can grab all of the polylines that we created, and apply tolerances. So again, if our walls aren't connected, you see here, my wall's not connected up here, so I can leave a tolerance and say if that gap's more than four inches, leave it. If it's less than four inches, close it up. So I'm going to call that, I'm just going to give that 12, just so we know it's going to close that gap for me. And we can do rotation, if it's more than five degrees, leave it, if it's less than five degrees, square it up. So I'm just going to say OK, and if you look over here, you'll see it's showing me in red all the areas that it's going to make an adjustment. You'll see the alignment's just a little bit off from the original line, and if I want to keep that, I'm going to say keep it. And if we now go back and re-address our angles, you'll see that angle's now a nice, perfect 90 degrees. Everything's been squared up. So once again, these are very simple placement tools that we use to pick points from the Point Cloud. And just by simply picking points, you can see that we can very quickly create some simple two-D floor plan drawings.