DDE - Dynamic Data Exchange
OLE - Object Linking and Exchange
Thank you for the info. I've been out of the loop for a while with the
program. At the time I would scan them in since we were still back in the DOS
days. It seems that they have finally solved some of the problems with
AutoCAD, actually swallowing third party ideas and incorporating them I
suppose. I got off the bus at DIESEL another script like language built into
to AutoCAD and started to think the whole thing to big and did suffer from
crashes. When DOS first came out it had an unreported bug, that just before
10 megs was filled on the disk, it would crash the whole disk, but that's
ancient history.
I used PhotoCad, which using a Gaussian distribution in the vanishing point
would allow one to use a relatively flat photo on a digitizing tablet and
trace after registering as few as two 3D points in space, registered with a
transit the best scenario. It was about $200 dollars, a single photo
photogrammetric application that drew real time inside AutoCAD as you
digitized the strata, necessary sometimes on large site and/or contaminated
soils. It worked fairly well, though we were using Rollei's MR2, which I
traced twenty or so more profiles. I have been looking at $750 PhotoCad which
will use the original photo textures and attach them to the 3D model after
its created, the virtual image actually shaded by the photo realism.
I don't know if anyone is familiar with the "Center For the Study of
Architecture" at Bryn Mawr, PA. "CSA was founded in 1986, incorporated as a
Pennsylvania not-for-profit corporation in 1987. It is a public charity, 501
(c) (3) organization, as defined by the Internal Revenue Service" They have
done comparisons on the value and speed of transit recording versus
close-range photogrammetry and many other studies of archaeology and the
computer/transit interface and have a newsletter and site where it is all
stored, including articles on picking databases and other relevant
information. They have also proposed a standard of layering inside the
AutoCAD or compatible database so that information can be stored about
architecture from all around the archaeological world in a standard format so
that layering conventions are universal among archaeologists recording
architecture. I was unaware of these studies as they were conducted during
the same periods that I was attempting to use most of the same equipment and
software. I don't know if there has been a collusion here, but the
coincidence is probably, in Marxian terms, economic as these tools became
available and written about more people would use them, the hope of any
manufacturer. Software in that case was supplied through Canadian developers
for Rollei and other support from Rollei in NJ and Schneider Instruments on
Long Island, NY. The MR@ system has been chosen for much police work in
Europe as of late. NOAA archaeologists have tested it underwater and found it
adequate for recording wrecks. Flybys in helicopter of cliff dwellings and
aircrash scenes are possible though I have never been involved other than in
an archaeological context.
http://csaws.brynmawr.edu/web1/csa.html
George Myers
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