hide dashed outline of areas, and other q's

[JamesMaeding]

How do i get the dashed line to go away for a house or tree area?

Can I define a building type, like a skyscraper or office building? I only see residential and neighborhood in the styles palette.

Can I overlay two images and have one be on top and 50% transparent?

I'm using 2013 version.

thanks

[JamesMaeding]

wow, no responses from Autodesk on simple issues for an emerging product.

Not sure if they realize our successes are free advertising, but may not matter now that AIM is shoved into the 2013 suites.

[lokitzj · Accepted solution]

The dashed green lines are visible when you're in edit mode.  To turn them off, simply click on the arrow button which will put you in select mode.  Also, today we don't have different classifications for buildings.  So, while, yes, you can create something that looks like a skyscraper, it is really just a tall structure in AIM.  Finally, yes, you can apply imagery as covereages which can be overlaid.

I hope this helps.

Thanks,

Justin

[JamesMaeding]

awesome, just click out of edit mode...

imagery as coverage? Can you be specific since I thought that word referred to shapefiles and old ESRI format.

Is it just an image with world file brought in as something besides a raster?

Is there any transparency control over coverages?

thanks

[konstantin_baumann]

Image overlays:

AIM supports at lot of "referenced" image formats, esp. the most often used GeoTIFF format; for a list of supported formats have a look here: http://www.gdal.org/formats_list.html.

Right now, we support transparency encoded by the image (e.g. RGB + Alpha); an additional "global" transparency value per image (in order to also make the opaque pixels transparent) is not supported (yet).

And you can define the "stacking" order of overlapping (semi-transparent) textures with the help of the "Manage Surface Layers" dialog from the "home" ribbon.

Coverages:

Coverages are "just" polygonal features which can be draped onto the terrain surface; they do not refer to ESRI's Shapefiles, although you can import such polygons from Shapefiles for sure and a lot other vector data formats.

You can stylize the resulting coverage polygons by assign AIM "Materials" (either simple (semi-transparent) colors or (semi-transparent) textures) to them; you can also assign self-defined "coverage styles" to them, which allow additional "category => material" mappings and to specify some outlining. If several coverage polygons overlap the corresponding transparency contained in the material definition is also taken into account.

[JamesMaeding]

Good info.

So the coverage method is only for shapes, I thought you were saying it applied to images too.

I guess you could make a material out of your aerial image, but lining things up would be a pain, if possible at all.

So for images, you are saying to bring them in as rasters, and control how you see one image under the other via alpha, which is hardcoded in the image, and I think only certain formats like png support that. Does jpg support it?

If that is true, I should be able to pull in an overall image, then separate smaller ones that just cover certain areas.

If I set the order for smaller ones on top, they should block the overall image and would appear spliced in, to the user.

Anyone tried that as I did the other day and it did not seem to work.

thx

[konstantin_baumann]

1. Yes, coverages are for shapes only.
2. It would be possible to line up an aerial image used as a material; but that would be tedious and a manual task, since the world file will not be considered here automatically; so the way to go is to use "Import Raster dataset".
3. PNG, ECW, MrSid, and GeoTIFF (among others) support an alpha channel; JPG does not!
4. Yes, it should be possible to first import a coarser overall/backdrop imagery and refine that locally by high-res imagery. You can adjust the "stacking" order of those terrain textures via the "Manage Surface Layers" dialog later on, if you imported them in the "wrong" order.
5. Hint: you can add a complete folder containing a bunch of geo-referenced image and they get stitched together automatically by AIM (if they have the same resolution and orientation). Or you can select multiple image files in the "import raster" file dialog; or you can also drag-n-drop multiple images from the Windows explorer window into the AIM main window to trigger the raster data import process...