Exporting Orthos for use in AutoCAD

[AndrewBowne]

Has anyone successfully been able to export Orthos out of Site Scan Manager and import/attach them to an AutoCAD DWG?  Every image we try to attach in AutoCAD we get the following error:

[JoeBryant1]

Hi Andrew - I'm subscribing to your post as we plan to do the same thing once we are up and flying with SiteScan. I'm not a CAD expert, but I know we have struggled in the past with providing imagery from GIS to Autodesk Civil3D.

How are you importing the imagery? And in what format? I know that our engineers prefer to use the  MAPIINSERT command when they are provided a TIFF with a georeferenced world file.

[AndrewBowne]

We still haven't successfully been able to import any of our imagery generated in Site Scan to AutoCAD.  SiteScan exports the ortho imagery out as a GeoTIFF (no world file.  The spatial info is embedded in the TIFF itself).  When we try to import it into any flavor of autoCAD, we get the errors mentioned above.  We have no problems adding the GeoTIFF's into ArcGIS Pro or ArcMap.

I'm really curious to hear if anyone has success.

[JoeBryant1]

What command/workflow are you using to import the imagery? Is your imagery hosted in the cloud or downloaded, either locally to the machine or on a file sharing network?

[AndrewBowne]

We export the orthos out of Site Scan to our network file system.  By default they come from site scan as a geotiff.  Our CAD team then attempts to load the orthos in using either ATTACH or MAPIINSERT and it fails with the errors I show above.  They have tried with the orthos on the local machine and they get the same error.

[troyg]

Have you tried exporting it as a .DXF file?

[JoeBryant1]

@AndrewBowne 

I just spent some time troubleshooting bringing orthorectified satellite imagery into Civil 3D (not from SiteScan, but the principal is the same). The main thing we found is that we couldn't use 32-bit floating point rasters. I had to use the Copy Raster Tools to convert the raster to an unsigned (positive values only) 8-bit tiff. 16-bit may work, but we knew 8-bit worked and just went for that.

FYI: CAD can choke on large tiffs, so we usually use GeoExpress to compress the file to MrSID. 32-bit floating is also not supported for creating generation 3 MrSID files; you are forced to use Gen 2 or 4 which don't work in Autodesk C3D. This is just what we found from some experimenting; if you find more thorough documentation from Autodesk (good luck!), I would default to that. 

[AngelaGray]

We just figured this out for our environment. We installed the free ArcGIS plugin to Civil 3D and we download the ortho photos from Site Scan onto the network but manage them through Image Server.  First thing is use the Coordinate System button on the ArcGIS ribbon that is installed into Civil 3D and set the coordinate system to the State Plane coordinate system the DWG file is in. Then using the Add data button on that ribbon, add layer as URL and paste the imager service REST URL into the field. Everything lines up and we do not have to deal with file sizes.

[MikeStone]

One of the major difficulties with bringing GeoTiff images into Civil 3d or AutoCad is that these products are not capable of handling the "Big Tiff" file format. You can export to .jp2 or another format but C3d and Autocad will require the Image files to be less than 2GB and the smaller the better (unfortunately this was always results in lost resolution).The Plugin is great. I didn't even know that it existed.