The Bing Map integration within Civil 3D is an awesome tool for quickly connecting to aerial imagery. What do we do however when we need historical, seasonal, and specialty aerial imagery? That's when the search is on! Maybe your company has a large collection of these or maybe you "know a guy or gal" at the local municipality with access to these. If these options don't pan out, then we're left online searching. Today's post is an example of one such search I did this week to assist a customer. After locating the imagery, I show the two primary methods of bringing this data into Civil 3D; one of which requires Raster Design to also be installed on your machine. If you're not using Raster Design currently, there are other methods (and I show one in this video)-but I still have to say that you're missing out...
Check out the video below to see this workflow in action.
-Alan
Alan,
While I don't disagree with anything you've shown in this video, there are a couple of points that are important to point out.
First, users should note that when imagery is added to a drawing as an FDO layer that the imagery will not be visible when that drawing is XRef'd. FDO layers are only visible in the drawing that connects to the source.
Second, in addition to the FDO connections the Map 3D tools present in Civil 3D include MAPIINSERT. This tool will read the world files (like the SDWs in your example) and reference the images into the drawing using the appropriate coordinate system transforms, much like Raster Design does. This approach has the benefit of not requiring Raster Design, and allowing the images to be visible when the drawing containing them is referenced by another drawing.
Thanks for all of the great content you guys provide.
Posted by: Gregory Lyons | 09/01/2017 at 11:01 AM
Thanks for the great comments! The FDO limitations definitely should be considered. My Raster Design bias is only due to it pulling me out of several coordinate system jams over the years :-).
Posted by: Alan Gilbert | 09/01/2017 at 11:34 AM