During kubits closed door meeting last year at Spar 2010, the company announced the compatibility and support between the native Autodesk PCG engine and kubits classic PointCloud tools in AutoCAD 2011. kubit promised attendees that the future of point cloud support in AutoCAD would now aim to serve the needs of specific industry workflows. The team promised and has now delivered PointSense Plant, the first industry specific solution for piping, plant and industrial facility design in AutoCAD. Now users involved in industrial facility design can use enormous data sets efficiently in CAD, utilize kubit tools for pattern recognizing assets from the cloud and move directly into their familiar AutoCAD based piping design programs (Plant 3D, MEP, CADWorx, AutoPlant, etc.). In addition, kubit PointClouds classic tools for modeling, managing and manipulating data sets are embedded into PointSense Plant.
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The official product release date is scheduled for May 1st but interested users can gain access to pre-release versions for testing by contacting kubit through www.kubitusa.com. The kubit team will also be posting videos on their YouTube site at www.youtube.com/kubitTV.
PointSense Plant
PointSense Plant introduces many new features including the Walk the Run tool which guides a user through a pipe run while recognizing accurate tie-in points for pipes, elbows and inline fittings. Users are able to import kubits provided catalogs, import their own or create custom objects from the cloud data for pattern recognition. Standard AutoCAD solids are generated from the run and an intelligent centerline is derived which provides the correct starting and endpoint locations for each object along the run. This line can be used to pipe over with more advanced piping design software and/or exported into other industry standard programs.
Modeling Not Required:
In the case that modeling is not required or desired, kubit has provided an intelligent tagging routine for marking facility assets, coordinates, elevations, line numbers and more. These tags are structured in a database which can be easily imported and exported in a shareable format. Clash detection routines between the cloud data and the newly proposed design are also available. This way a user does not need to model the cloud data before running clashes between existing conditions and new design.
kubit made the official announcement March 21st during their user workshop at the Spar 2011 conference. The team is hoping to continue advancing the new plant module as well as add more industry specific modules to the PointSense family in the future.