Ground Plane Images

[Mike Binder]

I am having a devil of a time doing something that SHOULD (it seems to me) be easy.

I have some JPEG site maps that I want to trace over to get the surrounding buildings and put my new building in context.

I have tried background images, putting a texture on a really big extruded rectangle, creating an image prop. Nothing seems to work. Either the JPEG image is invisible or I get tiling problems, etc.

Remembering that I want this to help me construct geometry at scale, and NOT necessarily as a rendering tool later (that will be another day), does anyone know of a good way to do this or a way to escape the pitfalls that seem to have me stumped?

Thanks.

Mike

[Jonathan Pickup]

if this is just for 2D information, have you tried to create an image. Images are 2D and you can apply them to rectangles.

[islandmon]

Import the jpeg to a new Layer set to the DLayer of the site then scale object the jpeg to match up with the site lines. Also,make sure your BitMap resolution in Document Preferences is set to hi-res.

This will slow your screen redraws but make the image visible.

[Jonathan Pickup]

set your layer options to show/snap others

menu bar >

Organize > Layer Options > Show/Snap Others

[Mike Binder]

OK, thanks.

I got it to import the image and even to apply it to an object. It only seems to work if I am working on the layer with the image. Working on any other design layer, the image is replaced with a bounding box.

This will get me what I need for the time being, though I wish VW had a feature similar to SketchUp for doing work like this.

Thanks again.

Mike

[Kaare Baekgaard]

>and NOT necessarily as a rendering tool later (that will be another day)<

A fast way to get both is to import the image as an image prop, disable auto-rotate and rotate the prop to fit the ground plane, then import the image again as a simple 2D image, scale and fit it to the prop, select both and convert them into a symbol.

Now you have an image-ground-plane in 2D as well as in 3D.

[Travis]

Wow, Kaare, what an elegant solution. Hadn't thought to use a Symbol to hold images. Thanks.

[ErichR]

You might also check the layer projection: top/plan, say, for BOTH the image and for your overlay tracing layer.