27 Jul Image handling in Civil Designer Software
Civil Designer has always been known for its extensive image handling capabilities and can handle the following image formats: MrSID (*.sid), ERMapper (*.ecw), Tagged Image Format (*.tif), Bitmap (*.bmp), JPEG (*.jpg), JPEG2000 (*.jp2), Portable Network Graphics (*.png), Graphic Interchange Format (*.gif), Truevision Targa (*.tga).
Multiple, large images such as orthophotos or aerial survey images can be quickly loaded into a project so that the spatial relationship of your design to other terrain features can be assessed. The software can handle over 300 high resolution aerial survey bitmaps, used as a design backdrop within a single project.
Multiple, large images such as orthophotos or aerial survey images can be quickly loaded into a project so that the spatial relationship of your design to other terrain features can be assessed. The software can handle over 300 high resolution aerial survey bitmaps, used as a design backdrop within a single project.
ECW Image Tiling in Civil Designer
Image tiles can be read directly from ECW and MrSID satellite photographs. This means that rather than creating BBF files for an entire aerial survey photograph, Civil Designer can load and draw the image tiles that are required. This allows very fast image handling of ECW or MrSID files greater than 2GB.
Geo-referenced images
Geo-referenced images (TFW, ECW, SID, etc) are automatically positioned according to the survey coordinate system of the design project. Google Earth snapshots can be captured, geo-referenced and imported into the correct position on a survey drawing. It is also possible to extract grid elevations of your project and export project CAD lines from visible layer(s) back to Google Earth as a KML file.
Geo-referenced Cropped Images
Civil Designer allows you to export part of a large image in your drawing to a JPG image file, with a corresponding ‘world file’. This is useful for example when you want to send part of your project drawing for review without the large image (which may be many gigabytes).
The highest detail level image tiles that are included in your selected and cropped rectangle, will be assembled into a new image, which will be saved with the file name/path that you specified. A .JGW world file (which contains geo-referencing information for the image file) will also be saved in the same folder.
The cropped image you saved may be used to replace the original image, or inserted into another drawing. If the drawing uses survey coordinates, the image will be automatically positioned at the correct coordinates (according to the world file).
The technical-tip video below demonstrates how an ECW file of the entire Western Cape of South Africa, at a file size of more than 26 GB, can be loaded and displayed instantly: