Creating an Imagery Mosaic is ideal for demanding design projects that require high-quality images with very good clarity. Perfect for large areas as well.
Introduction
In cases where the project area is quite big (i.e. the Zoom level of a Simple Image, is quite low) or when detailed imagery is needed, for example in order to act as an underlay in which the design will be based, the "Create Imagery Mosaic" command will be used.
The quality of an image depends on the Zoom level (or eye altitude - the vertical distance between the object that captures the image and the earth's surface).
Now imagine having various pictures from various heights. If you are too high, you will be able to cover the whole area. However, you will be able to see very few details.
On the other hand, if you take pictures from a very low height you will be able to see more details, but you will need to take more pictures (tiles) in order to cover the whole area.
Plex-Earth automatically takes all these tiles and combines them into a large mosaic for better quality.
A mosaic is actually a grid of high-resolution images or alternatively, a high-quality image that is consisted of many tiles.
Moreover, the importing time of a mosaic is higher, depending on the are and/or the Zoom level.
This tutorial walks the user through all the necessary steps, in order to import Imagery Mosaics into AutoCAD drawings.
Note: Before using any "Imagery" feature, the georeference of the drawing must have been
defined. Otherwise, the software will not know where to place the imported images.
Step 1: Create Imagery Mosaic
In order to do that:
a) We click on the "Create Imagery Mosaic" command from the Imagery panel.
b) We then are prompted to specify the area we want to cover with imagery.
*Imagery Manager might already be open, for example by importing firstly a Simple Image.
c) From the window that will pop up, we select our provider.
Νotice that now, in contrast with the Simple Image we can now define the Zoom Level. Remember that each provider has a different Zoom Level available.
When the settings are defined, we click "OK" and "Create Mosaic".
d) A grid will now appear that will be showing the tiles which will cover the area.
By clicking on "Fetch Images", all the tiles will be downloaded.
However, there is also the capability to import specific tiles. We just go to the "Imagery Manager", hold "Ctrl" and click the desired Tiles.
In this case, only Tiles 6, 14, 22 and 30 were selected and this is why they are highlighted on the grid.
Again, by clicking on "Fetch Images" you can now fetch only these specific tiles.
The importing process will now begin.
If later on, more tiles are decided to be imported, the same process can be followed.
We just select the new tiles and click "Fetch Images".
In this example, we also added Tile 38, and our resulting image is the following.
You can also remove the gridline from the respective button in the Imagery Manager, or you can exit the editing mode of this specific mosaic by clicking on "X", on the top-right corner.
An additional feature of the mosaic editor is the ability to import tiles (or reimport existing ones) from different datasets.
For example, in the picture below, if we "Datasets", we can select to import imagery from various dates. This can be done for each tile (or any group of them) separately.
As each provider offers different features, datasets and capabilities, click here to find out which features each one supports.
And this is one of the pieces of magic that Plex-Earth offers.
Conclusion
Plex-Earth 5 offers high-quality, up-to-date imagery, fast and easy, from all over the world. In our case, a picture is worth the amount of money and time the engineer saves. Satellite or aerial imagery is a great tool for providing invaluable information about a project. Sometimes it’s actually better than being there, as you can access them from your office, during the design process. Actually, with our collaboration with the best providers in the field, like Maxar, Nearmap and Hexagon, Plex-Earth 5 definitely changes the old saying to "Seeing is designing"!
Feel free to contact us at support@plexscape.com, for any questions you may have and don’t forget to start your free trial today.