Have you ever wished your DWG projects could be visualized on a realistic terrain in AutoCAD?

Plex-Earth 5D can make your wish come true by importing real-life terrain in its workspace with only a few clicks.

Introduction

Plex-Earth has been really well known for its endless capabilities. With one of them, being the ability to convert 2D imagery, into realistic 3D models.

This feature, can instantly provide information regarding, terrain's quality, characteristics, altitude variations, etc.

It can be a useful tool, for every designer and engineer, in order to draw the conclusions they need and help them accomplish their projects, studies and assessments, from the comfort of their desk.

To learn more about it follow the detailed Tutorial, and unwrap Plex-Earth's magic.

NOTE: The Draping feature can be applied to any image imported in AutoCAD as a raster image. Therefore, you are not limited only to Plex-Earth's imagery, but you can also use, for example, drone images.

Step 1: Import Imagery

Before we begin, we must make sure that the drawing is georeferenced (tutorial). In case you don't know the coordinate system, or you start with a blank DWG, you can Quickly georeference a blank drawing simply by copy-pasting your area's Google Earth place mark, in Plex-Earths' workspace as shown in the attached tutorial.

Then, in order for the draping to take place, the imported imagery must be placed inside AutoCAD in the form of a raster image / external reference.

There are three alternatives on how to do that:

1) If we have a World file, like the ones created by Plex-Earth, we can just import it in our AutoCAD (tutorial).

2) If we have a GeoTIFF, we can go to the "Insert" tab of AutoCAD and select "Attach" from the "Reference Panel section".

3) For a general image file, like a .jpg, we go again to the "Insert" tab, select "Attach" from the "References panel", open our image and specify insertion point, scale and rotation.

Now we have our 2D image in our AutoCAD.

Step 2: Import Terrain

In order to import terrain with Plex-Earth 5, we can follow the steps described here. (Tutorial)

We now have in our AutoCAD both our 2D image and our mesh terrain.

Step 3: Drape Image to Terrain

Finally, we can continue our process and overlay the image to our terrain's surface.

To achieve that, we can select from the Plex-Earth's ribbon, in the "Terrain" panel, the "Drape Image to Surface" command.

Next, we will be prompted to select the imported terrain surface and the raster image.

Plex-Earth 5D will then complete the draping, so that we can enjoy following the privilege of real-life terrain.

NOTE: At this stage, remember to change your View from "2D Wireframe" to "Realistic", in order to be able to view the final result.

Conclusion

As you also must have witnessed, Plex-Earth can truly make your life easier. Now you can have a 3D view of your project's area, without leaving AutoCAD's environment. With the most pleasant part being that, you don't even have to leave your office's environment, to experience all this. 

Finally, if you want to enjoy more magic, then of course you can try out Plex-Earth 5D. This means more imagery features, more providers, editing tools, terrain data and the ability to import/export KML/KMZ features!

Just download your fully-functional weekly trial now.

Feel free to contact us at support@plexscape.com for any questions you may have regarding the use of Plex-Earth. Our Customer Service Team will be glad to help you!