3 FREE Digimap Alternatives for Site Analysis and Site Plans

three ways to convert google maps into site plans to illustrator and autocad and let's get started the first website is a website that i mentioned before which is cadmapper it is a free alternative to digimab as it allows you to download cad files straight from the website first of all you can download over 200 free whole city cad files those are not so detailed but they would be best if you are creating larger urban diagrams on a wider context but you can also download more detailed ones but you will need to sign up first the free map is up to one kilometer square and then over that you will need to purchase it will show you a nice exometric of the site or a 2d view which you can then screenshot and then you can download the sketchup file and enjoy i've gotten some comments from you guys saying that it doesn't work worldwide and i agree this is what i downloaded for a precedent study that i'm doing in porto and it's a good start to a slight plan but it needs some cleaning and refining roads are only one line so i'll need to draw that myself but nonetheless i use this drawing to create my site plan as well as the sketchup model to create a site section the second website is openstreetmap which offers map data for thousands of websites smartphone applications and hardware devices you can access different layers to maps similarly to digimap but it is free and it's open data which means that you are free to use it for any purpose as long as you credit openstreetmap and its contributors you can also export as a jpeg or a pdf but you can also export as an svg which is a vector-based file and then you can edit in illustrator to produce high quality diagrams so this is how it looks when i first imported the svg file so we have the watermark first of all i'm going to select same appearance and then delete all of the watermark you can see that there is a mask and if you ungroup it it looks really bad and it will take a lot of time to clean up so don't ungroup it instead isolate and work within the group [Music] i'm going to use this site plan as a cad file so i'm going to clean it up and delete all of the arrows and the icons but if you were using this to create any diagrams and these icons are actually really good and you can just use them as they are but because i'm deleting them i've created a shortcut to select the same appearance so that i don't have to keep doing it or going to the top select button and now i can edit and customize things so i can select all of the building same way select the same appearance or the same color fill and then i can change it change any of the landscaping any of the colors and truly make it my own and i think this is such a great site plan you can see how nice and detailed it is and how clean and i can use it for diagrams as well as autocad to export to autocad i'm going to go to file and then export as autocad file and then i'm just going to press export ignore all these settings and just press ok so when you open it in autocad you can see all of the things that were masked i first have to explode the site plan so that i can remove all of these extra bits right click on this river here and then select the same and then i can delete all of the hatches and you can see that it exported with all of the line weight as well as layers i think it's really nice and very detailed compared to the one that we downloaded from cadmapper you'll still have to do quite a bit of cleaning here because there is a lot of layers on top of each other but then again i think anything that you download online will just need a little bit of cleaning now the third way is to go to any website that allows you to edit your style so this website is called map style and it allows you to change the colors of the road delete the labels and this kind of eliminates any of the cleaning processes that i did for the other method so i'm gonna delete all of the labels and then go into terrain and make sure that it's hidden so that everything is leveled and then go into roads and i'm gonna change the highways and the main roads to one color and then leave the local to a different color that way i can select it in illustrator really easily press finish and now you get this message where you can copy and paste the styles so if you wanted to do this again you wouldn't have to go through these steps again i'm gonna use the snipping tool to take a snippet of the site plan and then add it to illustrator after i paste it in illustrator it's really big so i'm gonna scale it down just a little bit and if i go to the dimensions i can easily just add a number change the scale of it and then go to properties here and then press image trace and i'm going to trace it to six colors and as you can see it already transformed it into a vector file which is insane and i can go back into the settings and then change this so i'm going to change the paths to about 20 because that reduces the point and it makes the lines smoother and then the corners i'm going to extend it all the way to 100 because that makes all of the buildings a straight edges and that's it now i'm gonna press expand and now i can edit and change everything i'm gonna select the background and to delete it so now that i have a white background i can select all of the buildings and i can move things into layers and if you wanted to clean buildings like this for example i would use the shape builder tool to create the shape and then delete all of the strokes change the style of the row to black and white so you can see how it looks with just black and white roads and gray buildings and some green grass so once i open it in autocad i can delete all of the hatches and the fills and i can also edit any of the layers at any line way so i think this way is the cleanest way because it allows you to customize things straight from the website before you take the screenshot and you can see that there is not much cleaning to do here the second way is i think the most detailed one but it will have a lot of cleaning to do so now you have three ways to convert your google maps into autocad and illustrator you can try any of these methods to your own maps and your own site and let me know how they work for you and which one you found created the best site plan i apologize for my voice today i don't know why it sounds like this i hope it wasn't too annoying i hope you guys are doing well i'm rasha and i'll see you next time

Channel: Surviving Architecture

Views: 36,262

Rating: 4.9960041 out of 5

Keywords: Surviving architecture, surviving architecture site analysis, site analysis architecture, site analysis, architecture, architect, yt:cc=on, site analysis architecture photoshop, site analysis photoshop, site analysis google earth, site analysis sheet architecture, site analysis presentation, site analysis illustrator, achitectural design, architecture student, urban design, urban planning, masterplan, mapping, site analysis diagram, site analysis diagram architecture

Id: VT5X5cW4eao

Length: 8min 7sec (487 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021