Reality Solutions Roadmap – September 2021

We are pleased to provide an update to our Public Roadmap for ReCap products and services.

This roadmap may make statements regarding future events and development efforts for our products and services. These statements reflect our current expectations based on what we know today. Our plans are not intended to be a promise or guarantee of future delivery of products, services or features and purchasing decisions should not be made based upon these statements. We do not assume any responsibility to update this roadmap to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the publish date of this roadmap.

The first half of 2021 saw the release of Autodesk® ReCap™ Pro and ReCap Photo 2022. Big feature additions and enhancements in this release included a brand-new Scan to Mesh cloud service, and the ability to publish, share and collaborate on structured laser scan projects in Autodesk Drive, BIM 360 Docs and Autodesk Docs. ReCap Pro 2022 also included many core performance improvements in rendering, loading, and editing of large laser scan projects. For more information on this release, check out the Introducing ReCap Pro 2022 blog post and detailed ReCap Pro 2022 release notes.

The recent ReCap Photo 2022.1 update increased the photo processing limit to 2,000 photos, enabling larger sites to be captured and 3D reconstructed. Point clouds and meshes generated by ReCap Photo also saw improved stitch and coverage quality as well as accurate geolocation for use in InfraWorks.

To help explain our roadmap, we’ve grouped our plans by theme:

• Physical to Digital
• Collaboration
• Core

We use colors to keep track of the roadmap details.

Physical to Digital

This theme focuses on the capture and conversion of the physical world into digital, and on the processing of this digital data to be more contextually useful in your Autodesk design and modelling apps. For what’s ahead, reality mesh support in Revit, Civil3D (& AutoCAD), InfraWorks, and other Autodesk products is planned. Reality meshes are generally very detailed, large, and thus far have been very hard to bring into modelling apps. Soon, meshes generated from ReCap photo’s 3D reconstruction service and ReCap Pro’s Scan to Mesh service will be directly usable in these apps as references for their respective CAD objects.

Collaboration

Collaboration and cloud workflows are big focus areas for us. Especially since the start of the pandemic, we are seeing more people use BIM 360 Docs and Autodesk Docs to store and share their reality capture projects with remote, global colleagues and teams. Up until now, only structured laser scan publish, 360 image viewing and markup was possible on the browser. Development work on bringing full 3D point cloud visualization and markup support in the BIM 360 Docs & Autodesk Docs browser environments is well underway, with significant progress being made. This will eliminate the need for downloading large reality capture datasets for a lot of workflows and this is the first step we are taking in unlocking the power of cloud processing for new browser-based workflows.

Core

This theme focuses on optimizing reality data preparation and cleanup in ReCap Pro, so you can focus on your modelling workflows. Huge laser scan import and registration performance improvements are planned, making it possible for ReCap Pro to handle larger scan projects of up to ~1000 scans (from a previous limit of ~250 scans). At the same time, registration accuracy is also being significantly increased, especially for these larger projects. Automation of target extraction will reduce the time you spend registering and preparing your reality data, while also reducing the change of avoidable errors. RealView data cleanup support will make it possible to always keep your 360 image RealViews in sync with your 3D point clouds. Finally, your scan to mesh experience is going to be improved with faster, more reliable uploads as well as faster processing times. Coupled with the previously mentioned reality mesh support in modeling apps, you’ll be going from laser scans to using meshes as references in Revit in no time.

HOW DO I GET INVOLVED?

If you don’t see something listed here, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t on our radar. If you have specific suggestions for ways we can make the product better, we encourage you to submit them to ReCap Ideas.

We will continue to post updates periodically, and your feedback helps!  Let us know what you think.

Thanks!

The Reality Solutions Team