Delving into reality capture workflows

Reality capture is becoming more and more of a standard operating procedure in not only the civil engineering world but also many others, such as industrial facilities, architecture, and construction. It is not uncommon nowadays for civil engineers to encounter a point cloud and be expected to understand how to navigate and utilize such a dataset.

With that, let’s begin by opening Autodesk ReCap and exploring the interface. In Figure 5.4, we can see the home screen of Autodesk ReCap. The home screen allows for basic project creation or the reopening of previous projects for further development.

Figure 5.4 – Autodesk ReCap home screen

For our first exercise, we will create our own project and import a dataset we received from a surveyor, using the following steps:

1. Click the open a previous project button in the top-left corner of the home screen.
2. Navigate in the file explorer to the file...