Autodesk Recap (short for Reality Capture) has been around for the last couple of years and is software that companies really have not taken notice of until recently.  With the advent of reverse engineering more and more companies are using laser scanning to generate point clouds.  Now these point clouds look lovely but how can we get them into a CAD package (like AutoCAD) to actually do anything with them??

Step up to the plate Autodesk Recap.  This application can read in a whole host of file types that are generated from the laser scanners which are the following.

• Autodesk Recap Scans (.rcs)
• Faro FLS Files (.fls)
• Faro FWS Files (.fws)
• Faro Project Files (.lsproj)
• Leica PTG Files (.ptg)
• Leica PTS Files (.pts)
• Leica PTX (.ptx)
• Lidar LAS Files (.las)
• Zoller&Frohlich ZFS Files (.zfs)
• Zoller&Frohlich ZFPRJ Files (.zfprj)
• TopCon CL3 Files (.cl3)
• TopCon CLR Files (.clr)
• E57 Files (.e57)
• Riegl Files (.rds)
• Text Files (.txt)
• XYZ Files (.xyz)
• Autodesk Recap Projects (.rcp)
• Leica Raw Project File (.prj)
• Autodesk Point Cloud (.pcg)
• Faro XYB Files (.xyb)

So the procedure to get from the above mentioned files to an AutoCAD file.

Create a new project in Recap and open up one of the files mentioned above.  This will bring in the point cloud.  You are then able to crop out what you need.  You can also view it in different colour schemes as well as save different view states. For example if you had 4 different areas you could filter out the different areas by using the crop tool and then save them as different view states.

Once this is done you can save each different view state as 4 different projects and once that is done bring it into AutoCAD as an xref.