Drape Aerial photo

[Steve Riddle]

Ability to drape a georeferenced aerial photo or tiled photos onto a site model surface.

[Jeff Prince]

Amazed that isn't possible.  Marketing literature implies that it is a feature.

[PVA - Admin]

9 hours ago, Steve Riddle said:

Ability to drape a georeferenced aerial photo or tiled photos onto a site model surface.

 

This is currently possible with a single photo, what problems are you having trying to do it?

 

If you have multiple photos, they can be assembled into one with a photo editor and then imported as a texture and applied to a site model.

[Steve Riddle]

Hi Jim, thanks for quick reply.

I am trying to map it  accurately (using a geotag) to a site model created from an imported GIS .shp file.

The tiled aerial photos are also from the same GIS. we use them for Mapping large properties of 10-100,000  hectares and occasionally smaller properties.

The aerial imagery aligns perfectly in 2d with the vector .shp data from the same coordinate system but taking this to 3d terrain is where i'm having problems.

It seems there is some ability in vectorworks to create an image map or texture from the aerial photo. I may be overlooking something, but  but am unsure how to scale, rotate and set coordinates for the image so it accurately maps to the corresponding site model surface. 

The ability to accurately drape any kind of raster image (not just aerial photos) to a site model would be a useful tool for our workflows. 

(Another good feature to have with regard to this process would be the ability to import more than one image at a time, often these GIS file downloads include 20 or so tiles of aerial imagery).

 

Thanks, Steve

[PVA - Admin]

The multiple separate tile images would first have to be stitched together into a single image, most likely in something like Photoshop. (Well, I suppose you could do this in JUST Vectorworks, by importing all the images into a blank design layer, tiling them together in a larger square, then exporting all of them together as one image, but choosing that route would depend on what other tools you already have available for photo manipulation.) Then, create a Renderworks Texture with that single stitched image as the image fill, and it can either be applied to the site model as a texture directly, or added via a Texture Bed site modifier.

[Steve Riddle]

Thanks, I have tried the texture method but cannot find a way to map the georeferenced coordinates of the photo to the site model surface.

Is there a way to do do this?

[Francois Levy]

Hi Jim,

I seem to recall I used to be able to map an image  onto a site model—say, an aerial photo or a scanned hand sketch of a proposed landscape plan. I seem to be unable to do that though in 2022—user error no doubt. If I create a texture (even a non-repeating one), that is smaller than the site model, it repeats. Even if I make the texture the same shape and size as the site model's crop (challenging), the texture is applied to each individual face of the TIN. What am I missing?

On 7/27/2017 at 7:56 AM, PVA - Jim said:

 

This is currently possible with a single photo, what problems are you having trying to do it?

 

If you have multiple photos, they can be assembled into one with a photo editor and then imported as a texture and applied to a site model.

[Steve Riddle]

We can now link very basic aerial photography via the ArcGIS portal that will drape onto a VW terrian model, provided they are in the same coordinate system (see image below).

It is quite buggy and the image keeps disappearing off the model so is not that useable.

 

I haven't yet found a way to do this using georeferenced aerial imagery stored locally, this method would be preferable as we can customize the imagery we want to overlay and not lose it or wait for updates from ArcGIS 

[Steve Riddle]

Any progress with this feature? I am still having problems mapping  Aerial imagery accurately.

 

[Jeff Prince]

23 minutes ago, Steve Riddle said:

Any progress with this feature? I am still having problems mapping  Aerial imagery accurately.

 

 

Nope.  It still behaves the same.

You have to update your site model to get the image to load whenever restarting VWX.

I prefer to make my own site model textures as a result.

 

Site mode is white and needs reloading for the GIS aerial to show, background is from the built in GIS image feature.

I kinda like the white shaded relief compared to the low resolution/grainy GIS aerials 🙂

 

[Steve Riddle]

I resorted to texture mapping in the end,

It is  slow to set up, but found by matching the aerial crop to the site model extents I got something close.

 

1022-4Brev5b (dragged).pdf