Adding a Google Earth Image to AutoCAD (and Georeferencing)

hello guys welcome to another tutorial to get started first what you need to do is you have to zoom in to the corresponding area of your interest in Google Earth now for this tutorial I'll be using a certain location in Brussels Belgium so I have already zoomed into the place and generally this is the area which I would actually like to transfer into into AutoCAD so after you have identified the area the general extent of the area if you draw the attention to the lower right corner you can see that the coordinates actually given in decimal decrease in latitude and longitude but it would be easier if we actually work with meters rather than working with decimal degrees so we're going to do a couple of changes to the existing settings of Google Earth in terms of the units of measurements so what you can do is you can go to tools and go to options and from here show lat/long just change this to UTM Universal transverse Mercator and the units of measurement we are going to change to meters and kilometers the rest you can keep the default settings and we hit apply and ok and now when when I move my mouse cursor you can see on the lower right hand side the units actually got changed and also it identified the corresponding UTM zone or since we are working in an area which corresponds to Belgium you can see that it actually identified that Belgium belongs to the UTM zone 31 which is also being specified right over here so now we can proceed with the rest of the steps all right the next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to actually create two points so for that you can just go to this add place mark button and just move to place mark to somewhere outside of your area of interest but not too far because we're just trying to actually create a couple of benchmarks against which we can do reference the image once we moved once we transfer the image into AutoCAD this is something like a reference point that we are going to make so I'm going to name this one as let's say ref point one and as you can see when I move the point the coordinates changes in it the corresponding coordinates so what I'm going to do is I'm going to just place this somewhere over here and then I'm going to record these coordinates now I can simply record this in notepad just open up notepad and this is the reference point one and easting or X is going to be this and the northing coordinates the northern coordinate is going to be this and after that I can press ok just to make that a permanent point and since my area of interest is actually these fields so I'm just going to maybe create another point somewhere over here I can do that in a similar manner maybe somewhere over here I think should be fine yeah and this one I'm going to again change the name to the ref point two and in a similar manner I'm just going to record down the coordinate values as well we need the easting and we need the nothing so the easting is going to be this and the nothing is this now I'm going to click OK and make that point a permanent point so the next step would be to export this image into a into a separate JPEG you can actually make some more space by turning of this this sidebar by simply clicking over here and you can see that it actually creates some space and once you do that as the final step just don't forget to go to we've reset and click on tilt and compass because that'll sort of create the we've to have a proper top view without any without any tilts and once you do that just make sure not to move the map around or do any any further zooming or anything like that just go to file save and go to save image and in your case if you're doing it for the first time you might have these things like the title and the description the legend scale compass actually we won't need any of these so just go to map options and dis elect each and every item and once you do that you can go to the resolution option and probably create select the best resolution and you can save the image alright so I'm going to save this as image Brussels something like that and the type is JPEG alright now I think we can go ahead and open autocad and the very first thing that you need to do is you have to go to drawing utilities over here and first make sure that your units are in meters now by default my units are set to inches so I'm going to change this to be meters since we changed the coordinates of Google Earth to UTM alright the rest I think we can leave it as it is alright so as the next step what I'm going to do is I'm going to create two objects to which I can assign these two reference coordinates which I knotted down over here now you can do this either by maybe creating some simple object either a square or either rectangle or just a circle or even you can actually create a line where the coordinates at the two ends correspond to these two coordinates now I'm just going to go with the easiest option I guess it would be easy to create a circle so I'm just going to go to this circle tool and then just create a circle and you don't have to care too much about the radius at this point because we will be interested in the coordinates of the midpoint of the of the center of this circle alright so after that I can click on this circle and you can see the center XY over here now the X should correspond to each string and similarly Y should correspond to nothing all right after that you can hit enter and now you can see that the circle sort of disappeared isn't it because it moved to its correct X&Y coordinates now you can zoom into the extents in order to visually see that circle again you can just type zoom and press E because that'll zoom to the extents and you can see that the circle is over here and we need another circle isn't it so I'm just going to go to this circle tool again and create another circle somewhere over here don't really worry about the size or the location right now because we will be assigning the correct location to its Centers coordinates so let's take the information of the reference point too like this just copy it and paste it over here and see copy and paste it over here and you can hit enter and the circle will move to the correct location now what we can do is we can actually import the image now just go to insert and go to attach and browse to the place where you saved your image in the previous step now I already have the image which is the image Brussels jpg image and you can simply go ahead and open this and at this point just leave all the settings in its default mode and you can simply click OK alright now just make sure that you maybe zoom out a bit and make some space to draw the image sort of place the image so you can click somewhere over here and make sure that you sort of you know give enough space for the image to cover a good part of your working screen and after that you can just click somewhere just to place the image once you're done with placing the image now we can sort of align this image based on the center points or the center coordinates of these two circles by matching those coordinates now we can do that quite easily using this line tool you can go back to home panel and go to modify and over here you can see that there is one option called align now the way to use this align would be first you have to specify the object which are going to align now in this case we are going to actually align the image itself and then you have to click on one of the edges of this image like this and then you can hit enter and after that you can see the cursor actually changed into into a cross now you can specify the first source point in our case actually the source point is going to be the reference point one it's going to be this edge of this pin of reference point one because we know that down the coordinates of that particular point and you can click on that the edge of the pin over here and then we can move our cursor to the center point of this circle and then after that you can click your left mouse button now in case when you move your cursor to somewhere around the circle if the center point doesn't appear you can actually press f3 now what happens is when you press f3 you switch on or off the object snap feature to turn it on you can actually do press f3 and then just check the bottom over here just to make sure that the object Snap feature is on alright now we can proceed with the point number two now similarly I can again select the edge of the pin over here and try to align it with the center point of the second circle which is this point all right now we do not actually need three points just two points will be sufficient and after that you can just press ENTER again and then here you have the option align scale objects based on alignment points we can simply press Y to say yes yeah and you can see the alignment actually happened like this all right now we can select this object and right-click and then go to draw order and put the object put the image send the image to back all right once we reach this stage we no longer need this these two reference circles anymore so what we can do is we can simply just select you can select the circles like this and you can just hit delete to get rid of the circle and the same thing with this circle as well and now what we have is a perfectly geo-referenced Google Earth image in AutoCAD and now you can use this high resolution image to proceed with the rest of the work that you need to carry out within AutoCAD itself which can actually be quite useful in a number of cases so I guess that's about it for this tutorials so if you do have any questions or comments don't forget to add them down below and if you would like to see more interesting tutorials like this also don't forget to subscribe to our channel as well so thanks a lot for watching guys I'll see you in the next one

Channel: GeoDelta Labs

Views: 167,285

Keywords: adding, how, to, google, earth, google earth, GEE, autoCAD, georeferencing, align, CAD

Id: l8SJkCdbmrg

Length: 10min 39sec (639 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2020