Draping Aerial Photos on a Civil 3D Surface in Navisworks

Those using Navisworks will find that your render materials applied to a surface in Civil 3D are not displaying in Navisworks.

Unfortunately this is the case at this point in time.

However it is fairly simple to deal with.

The render material of your photo will be in the dwg that you load in and you can easily apply it.

However there is one catch, the surface has to be the same shape as the photo so that the positioning of the photo will work.

So below is some steps on how to set it up.

So the key fundamental here is to extend your surface to the image, so in practice I would never alter the original surface, but make a new surface and paste it in and add more to it.

Here you can see the image I have that I want to use with my surface.  As you can see much bigger, I could cut it down, but visualisation looks better if you don’t fall straight off the cliff of your model!

So, grab some data from Google Earth or some DEM data, such as in the UK ‘Opendata’ by the Ordnance Survey.

Create a new surface, paste in your DEM/Google Earth data and then your survey surface.

Then add a boundary to the exact extents of your image to this surface.

(Also turn off the original surfaces, ready to open in Navisworks)

 

As you can see in Civil 3D, the draped image looks perfect

 

Opening up in Navisworks your dwg from Civil 3D, you will see both your surface and also the raster image in 2D.  But your aerial photo is sat in the Navisworks materials ready to be used.

Drag the image from the ‘Materials’ tab and drag onto your surface

 

Select the ‘Texture Space’ tab and select ‘Plane’ and then the ‘Fit’ button

 

Also you will see that your raster image is actually sat in at level 0, so select it and hide it as you have no need for it now

 

Final result, all draped and set correctly

 

Finally you see my image resolution looks as it should, this is because I have altered my options for presenter to increase the texture size to 4096 to get the best appearance, but be warned you need a good graphics card to ramp up these values.

 

Hope this is useful.

Jack Strongitharm