Arcgis for Autocad

[dgordon]

Has anyone downloaded this and installed it?   I was able to get the program installed and netloaded into c3d but when i went to access the esri online images it crashes C3D.

Has anyone had similar or different results?

Dan

[tzzzzoddhepworth4253]

Forgive my ignorance - what does ArcGIS do that you can't do with an FDO connection From C3D / Map3D's "Data Connect" ability?

[dgordon]

it gives you access to aerial imagery all over the world with wold coordinate files without having to install arcgis.

Dan

[dgordon]

i'm no expert on arcgis, but from what i hear from my neighbor here in the office, it does many things autocad cannot.

Dan

[tzzzzoddhepworth4253]

O.K. but from my quick perusal, it looked like the E$RI site is a annual subscription service.

Map FDO Data connect will also bring in image files recognizing their world files to reproject (ask me about attaching and printing another time) into your current drawing.

Don't forget that you can one-click import Google Earth imagery directly to C3D / Map3D - it's buried under the old Menu Bar, File - Import location, but there is an app from Autodesk Labs available to you for free.... try it out 🙂

[civilspace]

I"m not a fan of it in AutoCAD (I find it a bit finicky to establish), but WMS/WFS data connections have been available for a while.  This lets you connect to image servers all over the world.  Pair that with your own GeoServer installation, and you can serve your own image data and vector data via WMS/WFS to your CAD/GIS department and field techs.

http://docs.autodesk.com/MAP/2010/ENU/AutoCAD%20Map%203D%202010%20User%20Documentation/HTML%20Help/i...

http://geoserver.org/display/GEOS/Welcome

[Neilw_05]

I believe ArcGIS for Autocad is a solution for Autocad users that don't have Map. Since Map is included with C3D we should be able to do everything ArcGIS for Autocad does and more.

As was mentioned, map can connect to Web Mapping services which is more robust than the morelimited capabilities provided in ArcGIS for Autocad (note in the FAQ's AFA does not connect directly to WMS/WMF services).

In my opinion you would be better off learning Map for those purposes.

[tzzzzoddhepworth4253]

Here's a fun one for eveyone:

You can use an "image overlay" within Google Earth and then use C3D's ability to "screen capture" GE with the WMS data as a static image....

Always more than one way to skin a cat - I'm trying to get as many of them as I can.

TdH

[Neilw_05]

I don't know if the issue has been addressed in 2011, but previously there were problems with capturing GE imagery in C3D. It does not import the imagery accurately. This is due to the way C3D is designed. It scales the images relative to a centroid based on zoom scale. Thus if you capture images of a site at different scales, the images will not scale consistently and according they will not tile seamlessly. The behavior or more pronounced in certain geographic locations. A simple test is to capture an image at a site and then zoom in and capture another. Then overlay the smaller onto the larger and note the scaling differences.

Autodesk does not recommend using Google Earth captures for anything other than very primitive purposes such as vicinity maps or large scale concept maps. If you intend to use imagery for GIS purposes you should use more reliable sources.

[tzzzzoddhepworth4253]

well put - I consider it a "cartoon" - after all, would you drive across a bridge I designed based on a span length from GE?

But it can be a start to more reliable data sources that have established provenance / metadata 🙂

Thanks Neil

[civilspace]

Niel,

Exactly, I think that's where WMS comes in handy.  Your WMS server needs to serve in the projection your're working in, since on-the-fly transformations aren't working (to my knowledge) with WMS in Map.  But once it's setup, you can pan, zoom, plot at 150DPI, whatever, and Civil3D just requests whatever data it needs.

I think Civil3D just uses a simple Move-Scale-Rotate-Offset transformation, not the more advanced image warping (from a LL image to a UTM83-10 projection for example).  Thats why the accuracy seems off as you scale in/out.  I'd wager that the accuracy degrades significantly as you get away form the viewpoint center.

I can test this actually - hang on....

[civilspace]

Inconclusive - would probably work better if I used a road network as the reference linework rather than the Global Shoreline dataset.  Anyhow - it actually did pretty well (for this scale).

One of the other drawbacks no one has mentioned though is that the GE images are all greyscale.

[tzzzzoddhepworth4253]

Andy,

If you copy the image path from C3D then save & close, Keep GE open - DON'T MOVE OR PAN  in GE  - and then use GE's "Save Image" and paste in the path from C3D, you'll overwrite the imported B&W with color.

Anyways, I led us a long way from the OP - sorry!

[Neilw_05]

Try capturing images at different scales from this location. The scaling issue should be quite pronounced (Use AZ SP 83 Central)

Note: Due to website filtering, rename the attached file extension to .KMZ.

[susanhunter1]

I am interested in this topic. Have you ever gotten it to work?

My workstation is about to go to 64 bit, Win 7, C3D 2011, and I will be getting ArcGIS 10 very soon and I am wondering how I can get all of these things to play nicely together. I have not seen much information about this yet.

Regards,

Susan H

[susanhunter1]

P.S.

I am interested in the original topic in this discussion, not just how to get in a GE image. Thanks. Susan

[Neilw_05]

Susan,

If you are not familiar with Map, I highly recommend you go through the tutorials that are included in the Help System for Map. You will want to focus on Map's FDO (Feature Data Object) capabilities as that will be your primary vehicle for interacting with your ArcGIS data sets. Also you might find more help in the Map forum.

As I noted earlier, you won't need ArcGIS for Autocad since you have Map. It will provide better tools for GIS.

[civilspace]

Susan I think it comes down to what you're going to do with the two - how you're going to divide tasks, treating them like employees that work together.  

Personally I have not used ArcGIS for AutoCAD - but (since you're in this forum), I cannot think of why I would.  As someone else mentioned, I would think the primary user would be an AutoCAD user, not a Map/Civil3D user.  That's not to say you  shouldn't or couldn't make use of it, but that I just can't think of why I would.  

If you have both on your system - are you using Arc primarily for data analysis, or for map production?  Are you using Civil3D for data creation or Map production?  My workflow has always allowed the map/figure production software to be considered the "end user" of all the data created in the various softwares we use.  Therefore, the other softwares take on a supporting role and look after managing the data in the required formats/projections/data types.

I can't resist playing with new toys usually - but I guess I don't see any new novelty in the Arc plugin.  Especially now that you can "connect" to a SHP(or other data source) rather than hard-import it.

____________________

Edit to add:

I've really been to mordor and back as far as interoperability.  Software that gets used as required:  AutoCAD MAP/C3D-ArcGIS-ManifoldGIS-GRASS-QGIS-Illustrator, Storm&San Analysis, GeoServer, Google Maps, etc..

[Neilw_05]

If I understand your comments Andy, I agree that Map is best suited for creating base data whereas ArcGIS is betterr suited for performing analyses and generating thematic Maps. Not that Map is not capable, it is just not as robust in some areas. Also, a typical end user is not going to have Autocad Map at their disposal for consuming the data. A seat of ArcGIS is only about $1500 vs. $4k plus for Map, not to mention the learning curve for Autocad.

[civilspace]

For sure Arc is great at map production (automated labeling?  Holy ****.  Map just recently began catching up there.  Remember doing this 10 years ago in CAD?).  We have been leaning more and more towards Manifold over the last 2 years though, if you find yourself doing analysis over the course of your work (viewshed/watershed for instance), this really cannot be beat since it utilizes CUDA on recent NVIDIA cards.   Incredibly fast/robust and cheap!  Definitely our new primary GIS (used with PostGIS)