BIM on the Rocks

Using Raster Design to Crop and Convert MrSID

A few days ago, I posted about Favorite Uses for Raster Design: Cropping Aerial Imagery. Jason asked the question:

The aerial image I often use is .sid format. A high resolution image that I bring into Civil 3D through the Map 3D data connect. Do you know how i can crop this image in Civil 3D or perhaps with raster? The image covers the entire city so I would like to crop it to my work area.

I have had this problem often myself! I am happy to report that the answer is YES. You can make those lovely, giant MrSID (*.sid) files more manageable with the help of Raster Design. (Which, if I haven’t already mentioned, is now part of the Infrastructure Design Suite. Eventually, I’ll stop saying that.)

One thing to note- in his question, Jason said he is using the Map 3D data connect for his .SID. In order to crop the image, you’ll have to either use Map Image Insert (MAPIINSERT) or the Insert button on the Raster Tools > Insert panel (IINSERT). For more information on different ways to insert images into Map 3D and Civil 3D, check out Connecting to a Raster Image through the FDO.

Here is a *.sid file that I have. It covers an entire small city in North Dakota called Grand Forks. When I lived in Canada, my colleagues in Manitoba used to talk about their big weekends hitting the mall in Grand Forks, so of course I was interested to check out this short interview on youtube: City of Grand Forks Interview on Autodesk Technology and Expectation of Changes. I was disappointed that they didn’t show the mall, but I am sure it is spectacular.

Anyway, here is the image. It’s a black and white 1’ resolution *.sid.

I made a rectangular region:

And cropped it down to a smaller corner of the city. I could have cropped it down to just the neighborhood or site I was working on if I wanted.

Using the Image Export tool, I get the choice to export the image to a few different formats, including bitmap (.bmp), tagged image file format (.tif. .tiff), Portable Network Graphics File (*.png), JPEG (.jpeg), and JPEG2000 (.jp2, .jp2K).

 

I get some choices on export quality, which could help you if the image file is large and you don’t need it to be quite as fine as the original.

As I mentioned in the post about georeferencing scanned images, I can export the image along with a world file. This way, I am making the image more manageable without losing that geographic intelligence.

Not hard, eh? That’s how you convert a MrSID (.sid) to JPEG (or one of many other) image formats using Raster Design.

Check out the other posts in this series:

Favorite Uses for Raster Design: Georeferencing Scanned Images

Favorite Uses for Raster Design: Cropping Aerial Imagery

Favorite Uses for Raster Design: Merging Tiled Images

Favorite Uses for Raster Design: Georeferencing Scanned Images

Have I mentioned that Raster Design is now included in the Infrastructure Design Suite?

Earlier this week, I posted some of my favorite uses for Raster Design, Merging Tiled Images and Cropping Aerial Imagery. Today, I want to talk about taking scanned sketches and giving them geographic intelligence.

Remember this guy? That guy that likes tracing paper, colored pencils and pentel sign pens? We met him over in Alignments from the Land Planners Curves.

Well, he’s awesome and everything, but I don’t always know what to do with his sketches. Using a combination of Raster Design, Infrastructure Modeler and Civil 3D, I can take his ideas and use them to get my model started.

(I actually show this workflow quickly in this video from our media launch (starting around minute 10) and mentioned it in a post called Breathing Some Life Into Infrastructure Planning)

Georeferencing Scanned Images, Especially Pencil Sketches

Insert the scanned image and just place it somewhere near the area it belongs. It is useful if you scan the tracing paper while taped to some sort of print out of a map or base plan like the image below. (The blue and green interchanges are pen sketches on tracing paper over a print out of my basemap.)

Of course, I wasn’t that smart for the example I have queued up for this post, but we’ll go with it.

Next use any combination of the Raster Design tools Match, Rubber Sheet, Scale, or Displace to get your sketch lined up where you need it.

Once you have the image where you want it, use Image Export to create a new image of the sketch, and include the creation of a world file.

I can continue to use it in the Civil 3D environment, or I can use it other places- like Infrastructure Modeler.

If your planner has multiple sketches, you can built them as proposals in Infrastructure Modeler and use Autodesk 360 Infrastructure Modeler to share those proposals with your team.

If I want to take those conceptual centerlines back to Civil 3D to work on early stage design, I can use the IMX export from Infrastructure Modeler, then IMX import into Civil 3D. The yellow centerlines in the Civil 3D model are alignments. I can use some of the techniques I talked about in Alignments from the Land Planners Curves to begin some early corridor modeling and more detailed feasibility analysis.

James will touch on this workflow in our upcoming CE News webcast on June 28, 2012 called: Planning and Environmental Assessment with BIM for Infrastructure. That’s TODAY! Don’t forget!

Favorite Uses for Raster Design: Cropping Aerial Imagery

 

Yesterday, I posted about Merging Tiled Images using Autodesk Raster Design.

Cropping Aerial Photography

Now that I have one image, I often only need a portion of it. This is especially true with road design projects- I just need an image that covers the road and some right of way area on either side.

You can make regular shapes, but I will use the Crop>Polygonal Region option to make a custom shape.

The image is cropped.

If you don’t like the black pieces, you could use a rectangular region, but keep in mind that black takes less time to load than detailed aerial imagery.

Circle can be useful as well if you need to focus on a specific radius.

Again, I’ll want to save this image with a new name and produce a world file. The major benefit to doing your image manipulation in Raster Design over an image editing program is that Raster Design understands that you need to keep things in the right location.

Working with these photos reminds me of a post I wrote about Conceptual Road Design Ideas and using imagery to complement planning exhibits.

James will talk about creating exhibits for planning and conceptual design  in our upcoming CE News webcast on June 28, 2012 called: Planning and Environmental Assessment with BIM for Infrastructure.

Favorite Uses for Raster Design: Merging Tiled Images

Raster Design has been around awhile, but this year it was added to Infrastructure Design Suite. I’m really happy with everything we added to the suite this year, but I think Raster Design is one of those workhorse tools that quietly adds a lot of value.

Everyone I know who uses Raster Design has a few favorite workflows. Over the next few days, I’ll share some of mine. I’d love to hear yours.

Pasting Together Tiled Orthophotos

It always happens. You’re working on a site design or a road project and the information you need crosses tiny bits of about 9 high resolution orthophotos.

Insert the images so that they tile together, then use the Merge Images command to merge all of the images into one.

Note that the tool adds the images you choose to a destination image, so you’ll want to use the Save Image tool to prevent overwriting your originals. Or, change the Prompt Options.

If you work with tiled images a lot, you might like this old post about using the Map 3D Query tool to transform a bunch of images at once: Transforming Images from One Coordinate System to Another.

James will touch on another one of my favorite uses for Raster Design in our upcoming CE News webcast on June 28, 2012 called: Planning and Environmental Assessment with BIM for Infrastructure