Imagery Service default transparency

JohnBlackmore

We noticed recently that when our users bring imagery services into CAD using the plugin, the transparency is set by default to 30%.  I'd be interested to hear the logic on this.... I understand that the users can adjust that, but it seems like an additional step. 

 

Is there a simple "no touch / low touch" way to make the imagery services default to 0 transparency?

 

See attached image showing example:

We publish our own imagery services and create new imagery of our sites quarterly. In some cases we use world imagery or other services to surround our site, versus having our image appear as an island in a white ocean.  If our imagery service by default comes in at 30%, you can "see through" the service to the outdated basemap imagery.  While this may not be an issue for most people, we are a mining company and our sites change significantly between flights, even quarterly.

transparency_Capture.JPG

Screenshot 2024-08-21 153918.png

Randy_Garcia

Hey John!

Good question. We default to 30% as its a good way to show that maps are able to be transparent. Additionally we figured most people are trying to overlay data such as roads maps and imagery so you can still see the road labels through the imagery. I will say that our reasons for this aren't super strong and I would be happy to chat with the team and see what they think about defaulting it to 0. One of our other ideas is to include some more settings in the add data window before you even add a layer where you could set this.

For the time being there is no easy way to do this other than use lisp. If you add a map using lisp you can set the transparency at the time of add.

for example:

(esri_maplayer_add "https://sampleserver6.arcgisonline.com/arcgis/rest/services/Water_Network/MapServer"
  (list
  (cons "TRANSPARENCY" 0)
  )
)

You could wrap this up into a command for your users. As an example something like this would work

(defun c:TestAddMapLayer ()
(setq mapUrl(getstring "Url of Map layer to add: "))
(princ mapURL)
(esri_maplayer_add mapUrl
  (list
  (cons "TRANSPARENCY" 0)
  )
))

I hope that helps! I'll get with the team and see what we think about changing the default, I won't promise anything.