At Lands End

ToW LDX2011 - Fly to Option in LandXplorer Server

Flying to an object within the scene might be useful for demonstration purposes. In LandXplorer Server 2011 you can actually customize this option to "fly to" a location.

So how can user turn on the FlyTo parameters in Cube MapViewer?

1. Find ‘Default.aspx’ in ‘LdxServer_FrontEnd’ in the installation directory
2. Find ‘flyToDiv’, and change the ‘display’ from ‘none’ to ‘inline’

For the visual guys amongst you:

Autodesk Project Galileo and LandXplorer at AU 2010

I'd like to shout out a huge "Thank you!" to the great customers, partners, and Autodesk employees who contributed to getting the word out about Autodesk Project Galileo and the LandXplorer products at Autodesk University 2010.

Some notable highlights:

• Galileo was showcased on the conference mainstage, the Infrastructure mainstage and in press briefings given by Jay Bhatt, Phil Bernstein, Bryan Mathews, and Paul McRoberts that generated numerous hallway conversations for me around Galileo, Conceptual Design, and the integrated CAD/GIS/BIM/3DS workflow

• Dan Campbell, City of Vancouver, and Lynda Sharkey, Autodesk, gave fantastic talks and presentations on the value of city modeling, current software that can be used (i.e., LandXplorer) and the hurdles of the workflows that customers go through to maintain a model today

• The Autodesk Project Galileo Open House was so packed that I had to step over attendees' laps to get to my computer at one point.  We had about 40 attendees in a room set up for 18 people and many Autodeskers generously gave up their seats to allow customers and partners to see Galileo.  Bob Bray and I were both really excited and grateful that so many people came to see us and stuck it through the whole 90 minutes.

• The Open House was attended by attendees from at least four continents, representing work on at least 5 continents.  Any questions that the need for infrastructure modeling solutions is global?

• I was absolutely thrilled that two Open House attendees had built models by the end of the Open House from their own data using a pre-preview build of Galileo that we handed out at the event.

• All of the AU Galileo events have helped push views of the Galileo videos to 1500+

You can see the packed audience for the Open House here:

Keep watching this space for the imminent announcement that Galileo is available on Autodesk Labs!

 

 

LandXplorer 2011 videos from Maynooth, Ireland

The National Centre for Geocomputation, National University of Ireland Maynooth, has used LandXplorer 2011 to produce some great visual studies of their campus.  They have some fantastic building models and the videos make me want to return to Ireland!  (Bet you'd never guess that I am a citizen!)

A big thanks to Neil Brooker from our Farnsborough team for supporting them on this!

If you'd like to contact the NUIM NCG team, send us a note.

YouTube links:

LandXplorer Studio Professional

• Maynooth historic campus

• Maynooth north campus

LandXplorer Server

• Video-capture of prototype web-based point Viewshed navigation system for Maynooth north and south campus 

 

LandXplorer Server can't find host

Some folks who have tried LandXplorer Server 2011 experience an issue where they get an error message that the Server is not accessible:

 

It seems that there is a legacy field that some people fill out that does not need to be.  So if you experience this problem try the following:

1) Leave the "Base URL" field blank:

 

2) Put the complete URL here:

 

And let us know if it works!

(Thanks to Silvia Yu and team for the solution.)

Should I fear fast cephalopods?

Some of you may have noticed a new 3D Links menu on the LandXplorer Studio Professional 2011 interface.

The links under that menu item a small start on a longer term effort to being providing more content for scenery and furniture along with the LandXplorer products.  For the moment, what better path could we choose than to point our customers to Autodesk Seek, a really cool model sharing space evolving at Autodesk, and TurboSquid^TM, an independent clearinghouse of 3D model content created by digital artists around the world.  As we grow, we hope to build relationships with more vendors as well as to drive more relevant content into Seek.  

What's very cool about Seek is that content that you use is generally yours to play with.  The XFrog trees that have been donated up there are available for broad usage (though they are in MAX format and may need to be converted to something like 3ds or FBX for use in LandXplorer).

For TurboSquid, what you buy, you can use... and a secret is to sort your queries by price from lowest to highest.  You'll see there's lots of cool free content up there.  I can't do it justice, but here's a scene generated with some TurboSquid content against a backdrop of simple terrain and GIS data:

 

For those of you who were wondering if I might be a 3D artist at heart... clearly I'm keeping my day job...

I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts or desires about including 3D scenery or content with LandXplorer products in the future.  What are the concerns?  Would you be interested in seeing content from different locales?  What content formats would be valuable for you?

There's a whole world of 3D content out there on the web.  Go explore, starting with TurboSquid and Seek, and send us the screenshots!

How to deploy multiple projects on ldx server manually

At this point of time we are not able to set several projects on active on our Server. But there is a little trick how to make this happen, by copying the LandXplorer Server folder in your program directory. Common have a closer look:

Install

1. Install ldx server as usual

 

2. Copy all the installation files to a new folder

 

• NOTE: You may not want to copy the projects files if you have uploaded several projects and your project directory is set as default %INSTALL_DIR%\projects). In this case, please DON’T copy the contents in %INSTALL_DIR%\projects and %INSTALL_DIR%\config

       3. If you installed multiple renderers at step1, you need to edit the configuration file manually.

a. Go to the new folder (Assume it’s %INSTALL_DIR_COPY% )

b.  Open %INSTALL_DIR_COPY%\ LDXServer_Backend\Web.config% with your text editor. (This file is in XML format)

c. Delete all the sub nodes in node ‘configuration/LDX_Server/Renderers’ except the first one.

4. Go to the new folder (Assume it’s %INSTALL_DIR_COPY% ) to config the new server.

a. Open windows command window, and change directory to “%INSTALL_DIR_COPY%\Installer” by cd.

b. Type “Server_Installer.exe  –i”

c. The ‘Server Installer’ dialog will show

NOTE:

You MUST make sure the names for ‘Rendering Service Name’, ‘Port’, ‘Service Virtual Directory’, and ‘Client Virtual Directory’ are different with the names when installing. 

 

 You MUST make sure the ports are not in use.

 

d. Make sure to adjust the “Project Directory” if you did not copy it.

e. Go to %INSTALL_DIR_COPY%\ManagementClient and run ManagementClient.exe to upload a project

       5. View the projects in IE. The URL of the new server may like 

  http://localhost/ldxserverclient2011_Copy/

 

Uninstall

1. Open  command window, and change directory to “%INSTALL_DIR_COPY%\Installer” by cd

2. Type “Server_Installer.exe  –u”

3. Manually delete folder  ““%INSTALL_DIR_COPY%”

 

NOTE: To deinstal the services if something fails during installation

   Open the command window and type “cs delete %LDXRenderingService_Copy%”

PS: Install by Batch

User can also deploy multi-servers by following batch file

rem copy_server.bat

@echo off

if "%1" == "i" goto INSTALL

goto USAGE

:INSTALL

rem copy all the binary files to new localtion

robocopy %2 %3 /E /Z /XD Config projects

mkdir %3\Config

mkdir %3\projects

cd %3\Installer

rem run service installer

Server_Installer.exe -i

cd %3\ManagementClient

ManagementClient.exe

goto END

:USAGE

echo error parameter

echo copy_server.bat i install_dir new_location

:END

pause