AutoCAD Civil 3D

[#1]

For whatever reason, working with MrSids aerials with Civil 3D 2012 & 2013 is really slow these days.  Three of us CAD techs have Dell Precision T3500 PC's with 24 GB of RAM with Windows 7.  I worked with the same aerials 4 years ago using ust 4 GB of RAM with Windows XP.  Is there a better type of aerial technology to work with rather than the MrSid aerials? Should we try to get the County to purchase another type of aerial technology to more easily depict the County so we can more quickly produce aerial roadways with stationed alignments..  Dave

[#2]

Are you attaching these as FDO connections, or are you inserting the image into the drawing?

[#3]

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lissaucad wrote:

Is there a better type of aerial technology to work with rather than the MrSid aerials?

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Yes sir, connect to a WMS server.

[#4]

do you find that those types of images are handled more easily by C3D?   I'm not very familiar with wms servers.   Does your firm pay to have access to these or are there free one's out there?

[#5]

There are some free WMS servers out there.  If I have a SID image, I usually just "connect" it rather than insert the image.  Performance is much better.

[#6]

There are lots of free WMS services with imagery, but WMS servers will only serve the content of the service provider. Usually their offerings are old and/or low resolution and load times may not be any better than loading your own imagery.

If you have specific imagery that you want to use you'll need to reference them locally. Autocad has always been doggy with imagery. Using Map's FDO connection vs. inserting can improve performance and it also allows for the imagery to dynamically reproject to different coordinate systems. The down side to FDO and WMS is the images won't load for users who don't have Map.

[#7]

i did a fdo connect to raster image of one of our sid files and i did not notice any difference in performance over just having the image inserted into the drawing.

i'm finding it very difficult to find a free wms service to connect to.   quite often it asks for user name and password of which i  have neither.

anyone have any suggestions?

[#8]

Username and password are usually blank, you just hit OK.  Here is a link to some good WMS sites with username and password info...

http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/gis/ogcwms.html

[#9]

do any of these web services work for you?

NAIP Imagery - What's NAIP?
http://ge-nt.ncmhtd.com/cgi-bin/naip2010.cgi? - NAIP 2010
http://ge-nt.ncmhtd.com/cgi-bin/naip2010ir.cgi? - NAIP 2010 IR
http://ge-nt.ncmhtd.com/cgi-bin/naip2009.cgi? - NAIP 2009
http://ge-nt.ncmhtd.com/cgi-bin/naip2009ir.cgi? - NAIP 2009 IR
http://ge-nt.ncmhtd.com/cgi-bin/naip2008.cgi? - NAIP 2008
http://ge-nt.ncmhtd.com/cgi-bin/naip2006.cgi? - NAIP 2006

1998 DOQQs - What are DOQQs?
http://ge-nt.ncmhtd.com/cgi-bin/doqq1998.cgi? - DOQQ 1998
http://ge-nt.ncmhtd.com/cgi-bin/doqq1998.cgi? - DOQQ 1998 IR

I can't get any of them to connect.

I get this message every time

[#10]

Works for me, but if you scroll to the bottom of the website I sent you, there are links to better places.  The ones you listed are exclusive to North Carolina.  The links are under the WMS Indexes and Servers.