Geospatial Data Conversions: ArcGIS | QGIS | Google Earth Pro | AutoCAD

hello guys welcome back to the channel in today's video i'm going to show you how you can switch between multiple gis and drafting software packages and i believe this tutorial should provide answers to most of your questions especially that are related to working with different file formats and how to alternate between these different programs to manage your geospatial data and related workflows and similar to most of our tutorials i'm going to demonstrate these capabilities using actual examples because that i believe is the most effective way for me to teach these techniques to you guys as well as for you to grasp the basic ideas without going through much of a hassle so the four different software packages that i'm going to use for this tutorial as you may already have seen before are qgis arcmap google earth pro and autocad so without further ado let's jump right in and see how we can get started alright so in the first example what i would like to show you is how to digitize something in google earth pro and how to bring it over to autocad but in doing so i'm going to have to use qgis to basically do an intermediary file format conversion by the way for each example on the top of the screen you will see an indication of the summary of the workflow along with the corresponding specification of the file format all right guys as you can see i have opened up google earth pro and what i'm going to do now is i'm going to create a couple of different geometrical objects it could be things like maybe this river over here and we also can see a couple of islands on this lake and we could even go ahead and digitize some buildings it doesn't really matter i'm only creating these objects just for the purpose of this tutorial so in order to do that i'm just going to go over here and create a new folder and i'm just going to name this as items just a random name and while that folder is selected i'm just going to head over this path tool over here and we can just name this as river and all i have to do is just sort of trace along this river and if you would like to navigate around you can always use your arrow keys and you can keep on tracing just like this and in order to conclude the process of digitizing these line objects you can just click over here on ok and and that will create a geometrical object called river as you can see from here so in addition to this i'm also going to create a couple more things for example maybe let's create another polygon object to cover the boundary of this sort of island kind of thing that you can see over here so again while this fault is selected you can head over to this add polygon tool or you can simply right click over here and go to add and add a polygon and i'm going to name this as island and similar to what we did all i have to do is just trace over this well i'm not going to be that precise for the purpose of this tutorial because uh i'm not doing it to demonstrate to you guys how to use google earth pro and by the way i think i would like to get rid of the fill color so that the boundary will be clear so i'll head over to this style color tab and from here i'll select only outlined and if i increase the thickness you can see that that sort of uh lets me see the actual boundary of this island which i can digitize like this and after that you can click ok and over here you can see that in addition to this river object we now have a polygon object uh which is basically marking the boundary of this island more or less and i think i will create one more object maybe i will create another polygon to mark the boundary of this island that you can see on the side of this lake so i'm going to head over to items add and create another polygon in this case i'm going to name this as island 2. and similar to what i did i'm just going to trace along the boundary of this island i might actually fast forward the process just so that we can get to the part where i transfer these files into qgis for the purpose of then converting it to something that can be read by autocad and we'll click ok over here to conclude the process so as you can see over here now we have three different objects and we can actually save all of these objects to a kmz file simply by selecting this items folder and right click and we can click save place as and once you navigate to your working folder you can see that you can save this as a dot kmz file in which all of these different geometrical objects will actually be embedded and i'm going to leave the name as it is it's just going to be items.kmz so we'll just go ahead and save this file to begin with and right over here you can see that particular file items.kmz and now let's say if i were to deactivate all of this or even if i were to just get rid of this entire file altogether i could still retrieve all of those information back because now i do have a copy of those information as a kmz file over here so i'm just going to double click over here you can see that those three objects appear again over here and i guess that was a bit of extra information how to uh create these kind of geometrical objects uh by way of digitizing using google earth pro and now we'll see how we can actually open this up in qjs so what we can do is we can head over to qgis and in my case i'm using qjs version 3.14 but this should work basically with any version of qgis if you're using the latest version or even a previous version you're still going to be fine all right now we have open up qjs and before we try to import the kmz file that we just digitized and created just make sure that you're actually using the correct coordinate reference system and especially when you want to transfer stuff that you digitized in google earth pro into qgis just make sure that you are using the correct coordinate reference system wgs 1984 geographic coordinate reference system and the corresponding epsd code for that is going to be epsd4326 and right over here if your epsd code happens to be something different just make sure that you set that to be epsg 4326 wgs 1984 geographic coordinate reference system and make that the coordinate system of your data frame for example if i click over here in case if it happens to be something different you can simply search 4326 over here and you will be able to select the correct geographic coordinate reference system in this manner and after that we can click apply and ok and then we can head over to the kmz file that we just created and we can simply drag it and drop it over here and with that you will see this kind of a notification basically it's outlining the different geometrical items that we are going to import in this case you can see that the number of features in the first row is going to be one line string the geometry type is line string because as you can recall we had one polyline and we had two polygons those two polygons were basically the boundaries of those two islands so it's basically giving you a summary and you can decide whether to import all or whether to manually select what you would like to import now in this case let's say if you wanted to import just the polygon you can actually click over here but if you decide to import both you can simply highlight and import all three different items in this case we are going to import everything after that click ok and just like that you can see that we managed to import the three different items in this manner and over here i can add the google satellite map as a base map if i double click right over here and by the way if you're interested in knowing how to use google maps as a base map within qgis we also have done a tutorial for that you can click on the link that's appearing on the top right corner to access that tutorial and as you can see all the geometrical objects are actually getting placed exactly where they're supposed to be if i get rid of the fill color of this polygon yeah you can see that it's actually getting perfectly around the boundaries that we digitized using google earth pro alright now our intermediary step is almost done however what we are trying to achieve is transfer these objects that we digitized using google earth pro into autocad so we do have one more step left and that's to save these items in a file format that can be read using autocad and you can simply do that by heading over to project and you can select import slash export and from here we can select export project to dxf this dxf file format can actually be read using autocad and using this method is actually quite convenient as you can see over here all the different layers that we have that can be exported into dxf file format will be listed down here so you can select by yourself whether to export all of these different items or whether to export only a selected number of items in this case i would like to export everything and over here as you can see we are still using the same coordinate reference system and we are going to leave the rest of the settings as default and we are going to save this as items again but this time it is going to get saved as a dxf file and after that we can click ok and now over here you can see that in addition to the file that we had previously we also have a dxf file which can be opened using autocad now if i were to double click on this file you can see that autocad is actually getting opened up and just like that you can see that we managed to import the items that we digitized using google earth pro into autocad quite successfully if i open up these two windows side by side you can see that when i have my mouse point somewhere in the middle of this island the corresponding coordinates are around negative 80.8 longitude and 27.1 latitude and if i do the same over here you can see that the coordinates are more or less similar and that's actually a very rough way to verify that these geometrical objects have been placed at the correct coordinates when it's having been transferred from google earth pro through an intermediary step and just as a side note in case if you wanted to use a different coordinate reference system you would have to do that within qgis itself for example let's say that you didn't want to use this latitude and longitude coordinates in decimal degrees but you wanted to reproject all of these different geometrical items into a projected coordinate system and then transfer over to autocad you would actually have to do that step using qgis first and then only transfer it to autocad i'm just going to demonstrate that as well very quickly so before you do that you need to have a proper understanding of the projected coordinate reference system that you're supposed to use for your particular geographical region now in this case what i'm going to do is i'm going to find out the corresponding utm zone or the utm coordinate reference system which i can use for this part of the us and you would be able to quite easily find that using a map like this to identify the correct utm zone that you're supposed to use or if you're using google earth pro just like what we are doing over here in this case you actually can check that quite easily by heading over to tools and if you go to options over here you can select universal transfers mercator which stands for utm and if you click apply and right over here you will be able to see the corresponding utm zone that you are supposed to use in this case i'm supposed to use the utm zone 17 and of course we are in the northern hemisphere so it will be 17 north and to reproject all of this what i'm going to do is i'm going to first head over to this and search 17 not utm zone and that's going to be this one right over here wgs 1984 utm zone 17 north and we can click over here on apply and that's going to alter the coordinate reference system of your data frame however when you're exporting the data you will have to select this particular coordinate reference system and i'm going to re-export these items by right-clicking over here and we can go to export and we can go to save features as and i think for the time being we can save them as s3 shape files and while you're doing that just make sure that you're selecting the projected coordinate reference system that's supposed to be chosen over here which is utm zone 17 north and we'll name this as as river and over here you can see that now we have a new s3 shapefile layer called river and if you go to the properties of that you will see that the corresponding coordinate reference system has now been changed to utm zone 17 not projected coordinate reference system and similarly we can re-export this layer as well save features as select the appropriate coordinate reference system and i'm going to name this as islands because we have two different items in this file and click ok and for the time being i'm going to deactivate the kmz files and and now i'm just going to deal with these s reshape files which we created which are actually two new files that's having this utm zone 17 projected coordinate reference system and to export these files to dxf you can actually follow the same procedure that we did just a few minutes ago or you can export these items individually for example if you wanted to export only the islands you can right click over here and go to export and again go to save features as and in this case instead of selecting s reshape file what you can do is you can select autocad dxf right over here the crs has been selected automatically uh which is supposed to be utm zone 17 north and we're going to give a file name for this so we'll name this as islands and the file type is going to be autocad dxf and then we will head over to the folder and over here you can see that we have this islands dxf file and i'm going to double click that so we have the two different objects just like this and now if you pay attention to the coordinates down here at the bottom you can see that now the coordinates actually not the decimal degrees coordinates that you saw before but instead now it's using the values in meters corresponding to the utm zone 17 north projected coordinate reference system and similarly you can export this reverb shape file as well i'm going to name this as river and it's going to get saved as a dxf file as well if i double click over here on this river dxf file you can see that that line also appears just like this however just a small knot if you're opening the file for the first time the zoom extent of your canvas might not be properly zoomed into your object in that case it'll actually appear something like this and if you would like to zoom to the extents of your objects is it and select zoom and from here you can select extends and that will sort of zoom your canvas into the extents of all of your objects and in this case you can see that we happen to have just one single object because of that it actually zoomed into the extents of this particular object all right guys that brings us to the end of the first part of this tutorial and now we'll see how we can import these kind of geometrical objects from google earth pro into arcgis so for that i think i will still use the same data set so as you can see over here we have this items kmz file in which we've got these three features we have the river which is a polyline or a line string object and we do have two polygon objects as well island and island two and we'll see how we can transfer this over to arcmap so for that i'm going to first go ahead and open up arcmap and similar to what we did before when using qgis uh with regard to the coordinate reference system i'm going to first set the corresponding coordinate reference system in arcmap as well which in this case is the coordinate reference system of the data frame so i'm going to go to layers and go to properties and from here we can either search or we can just navigate to the corresponding item which is going to be located under geographic coordinate systems and if you scroll down there's one folder called world and right over here we have the wgs1984 geographic coordinate reference system and if you can recall the id that's 4326 so we can click apply and ok to assign that particular coordinate reference system for the data frame of my arcmap workspace and after that we can head over to the toolbox the arc toolbox and inside this toolbox there's going to be a couple of different conversion tools if you happen to expand this conversion tools you can see that there's one option called from kml and if i expand this you will see one tool called kml to layer so i'm going to double click over here and right now what i have to do is i have to link the corresponding kml file to this location right here and something to keep in mind is that even though it's mentioned kml over here you can actually use both kml or kmz files it doesn't really matter for example if you happen to click over here you can see that the input file can be either a kml file or kmz file so we'll open up this folder and the file is right over here and along with that we also can set the output location and after that you can click ok and after a while you can see that we actually managed to import the corresponding objects we have the line object over here and at the same time we have the two polygons of the two lakes and at the same time you can see on the bottom right corner the the corresponding coordinates also appear to be quite correct and from here onwards i think it's up to you what you need to do with this data for example if you wanted to export this into a different file format like s3 shape file you can actually do that by right clicking over here and you can go to data and you can say export data and what this is going to do is it's going to export your data so i think it's a good practice when you have already assigned the correct coordinate reference system to your data frame you can make sure that you have selected the second radio button what it does is it's going to make sure that the same coordinate reference system is actually going to get applied to the data that you're going to export as well so in this case let's say if i navigate to my working folder i would name this as lakes arcmap but you can basically give any name of your choice and we can say save so it's going to get saved as a shape file with this dot shp extension that you can see over here and when you click ok you can see that now it actually created an s3 shapefile if you go to the properties of this file under source you will see that it's a shape file with having gcs wgs 1984 assigned as as it's a coordinate reference system and if you open up the folder itself now you can see that it actually created this shape file in this kind of manner just like what we expected right so that was a quick demonstration of importing geometrical objects from google earth pro into arcmap now let's move on to the third part of this tutorial and that's going to be how to export objects from arcmap into autocad all right to demonstrate that you can see that i have imported one shapefile of the geometry type polygon called boundary and i will try to export this into a file format that can be read by autocad and so far we dealt with the dxf file format which can be read by autocad so if we can find a way to convert this file into either a dxf file or a dwg file which can also be read by autocad then we are going to be able to open this file using autocad so that's exactly what we're trying to do and when using arcmap you can quite simply export s3 shape files into file formats that can be read by cad software by right clicking over here and if you go to data from here you can see that there's one option called export to cad so here we have a couple of things to actually select now the input feature has already been selected in case if you happen to have different files over here you might as well just go ahead and drag and drop them over here and over here we have to select the output type and as you can see we have the option to go with either dxf or dwg now this will depend on your preference because autocad is actually able to read either of these different file formats but since we dealt with the dxf file format before for this i'm going to go with the dwg file format and for the purpose of this tutorial i'm just going to go with dwg version 2010 and here what we can do is we can specify the output file path and we can name this as boundary dot dwg and after that we can click ok and after the exporting process is done you can again head over to the working folder and you should be able to find this kind of a file i think immediately you can notice that the icon is different now because this file is of the format dwg as opposed to the file that we had before which was a dxf file and both can be opened using autocad so if i double click over here you can see that we successfully managed to import the object and if i click over here once you will also be able to see the different vertices like this and if you decide to do some edits for example if you click over here you can see that you can move the things around so now it's a fully functional object in autocad which you can manipulate or do for the edits as you see fit however if you do notice a slight difference in the shape when you compare this object with the one that we have over here that's actually because of the projection because if you inspect the actual file over here you will see that its coordinate reference system is utm zone 30 not whereas the coordinate reference system of the data frame is still wgs 1984 so if i happen to change this to be a projected coordinate system like utm zone 30 knot now you can see that the projection got adjusted and both the objects look pretty much the same in terms of the way how it appears alright additionally i have also imported two more shape files one called stations and another one called tracks and just to get a hang of the procedure we'll try to export these files as well into files that can be read using autocad so if you follow the same procedure it's going to be data export to cad and in this case we'll also be able to add this station's shapefile as well and both of them we can actually transform them into dwg now just because i used 2010 version in the previous case i'm going to use 2013 in this one and of course we'll have to specify the output file path as well i'm going to name this as other data dot dwg and click ok to export all right now let's head over to the folder and right over here you can see the corresponding dwg file by the name other data let's open that up and this is exactly how it's going to appear you can see that we have the two lines and the points might not be that clear but you actually can see the presence of the points as well and in case if you are wondering about the coordinates you can see a particular set of coordinates when i how my mouse point over here and in this case even though we are using a utm coordinate reference system units of the coordinates have not been adjusted yet so if you go to layers and go to properties and under general if i change the display units to be meters you can see that now we've essentially got the same type of coordinates in both autocad and arcgis alright guys so that wraps up the explanations of exporting objects from arcgis into autocad and let's move on to the next part in which we will discuss how we can export objects from autocad into qgis so i think what i'm going to do is i'm going to use the same objects that we are talking about over here in this example and as you can see we have a bunch of different items and over here we also have this boundary shape well if you would like to combine all of these together what you can do is you can select this and hit ctrl c however if you were to just press ctrl v what happens is that it will not get placed exactly where it's supposed to be with the correct coordinates so i'm just going to press escape and instead of pressing ctrl v i'm going to use one autocad command called paste orange and what happens is that when i use this command the object that's supposed to get placed over here will carry the exact same coordinates of its source so previously we saw that all of these objects were actually lying almost close to each other and now with the paste orange command you can see that it's actually getting placed exactly where it's supposed to be in terms of its special location so in this part of the tutorial what we are trying to do is we are trying to export this into a file that can be read using qjs so here we also have the freedom to export this file either into a dxf file or a dwg file because both files can be read using qgis so what we are going to do is we are going to click on this big a button and we will click on save as and from here you can see that we have the option to either save it as a dxf file or we can save it as a dwg file and i think for this tutorial let's go with dwg format and i'm going to name this as other data underscore 2 so that we'll be able to differentiate this from this other file right over here and we'll save this and after that we can head over to qgis again we can go to project and similar to what we did a couple of steps back we can go to import export and this time what we are going to do is we are going to import layers from dwg slash dxf and guys if you can recall the coordinate reference system that was supposed to be assigned for those files were utm zone 30 not so i'm going to correct it from here by clicking on this button and i would be able to search from here 30 north so that's supposed to be this wgs1984 utm zone 30 north and after that we're also going to assign a target package and i'm going to use the same name other data too because this is going to get saved as a jio package gpkg and now we have to specify the source the file from which we are trying to import stuff and that was going to be this other data to dwg file click open and we'll select all the layers and we need to provide a group name just going to name it as group 1 and click ok and after a while it should get opened like this maybe i can drag the google satellite layer to be below this group one layer and if i right click over here and if i say zoom to group you can see that now it zoomed us to the correct spatial location where these objects are actually supposed to be however you can see that with the default settings we can hardly see anything i think if i deactivate this google satellite layer we will be able to see those items a bit more clearly what i'm going to do is i'm going to click over here and export this and save it as separate layer and i think we can save this as an x-ray shape file we can name this as stations 2. yeah with that you can see that we managed to sort of get these points and we can do the regular edits if you would like to do for example if you would like to change the icon we can do so and if you would like to change the color you can do that as well and the size if you want to change we can do that as well yeah just like this you can see that you can make the amendments or you can make the changes according to your preference and same goes for the other two as well for example if you talk about the tracks if i go over here and export this to a separate s3 shape file called maybe tracks2 yeah now you're able to do all the manipulations that you would like to do for example if i use one of these templates yeah you can see that it actually changed over here and you can do that for this boundary as well but i'm not going to do that because you get the basic idea of how to actually produce a separate shape file using these objects that we imported from autocad all right guys that brings us to the next part of this tutorial and that's how to export objects from autocad back into arcgis all right guys now you can see that we are back in our autocad working space however the objects that i'm going to export back into arcgis are actually not going to be these objects so what i'm going to do is i'm going to select everything and i'm going to basically get rid of everything and i'm just going to draw some random objects like maybe a circle and a couple of polylines like this all right so we'll see how we can bring this over to arcgis all you have to do is simply save this as a dwg file similar to what we've been doing so far and this time i'm going to name this as other data 3 or basically maybe let's call this as random objects and i'm going to use the version 2010 and the format i'm going to retain this to be dwg and we can go ahead and save it so if i open up the actual folder that's going to be this random objects file and now if i open up arcgis i can click over here on this add data button and once you open that just navigate back to the folder that you saved the random object's drawing file in and after that all we have to do is simply click add and just like that you will see that we managed to import the same set of objects right over here in case if it's not clear for you guys let me go ahead and turn off this other stuff so that it will be clear for you so you can see that it managed to grab the exact special coordinates from arcgis and and the objects got placed exactly where they were supposed to be in our arcmap interface so guys that was quick and easy that's how you import objects from autocad into arcgis and that brings us to the final part of this tutorial and that's going to be how to export objects from autocad into google earth pro alright so to demonstrate this to you guys i'm using this drawing of different building footprints so before we export this set of building footprints from autocad into google earth pro we will sort of have to follow what we did in the very first part of this tutorial but now in the reverse direction that means we are first going to create a file that can be read using google earth with the help of qgis first and after that we are going to open that file using google earth pro so when you have a drawing like this in autocad you can just simply go ahead and click over here and go to save as and save this as either dwg file or a dxf file the version wouldn't really matter so in this case i'm just going to save this as a 2010 version dxf file and i'm going to name this as version 1 just so that we'll be able to differentiate this from this existing file and after that we can click over here and after doing so we can head over to qgis and you guys already know how to import dxf or dwg files you can go to project go to import slash export and we can import the layers from dwg or dxf in this manner or as long as the file is a dxf file you even can simply drag this and drop it just like this and the items should appear without any hassle so in this case since we are not really sure which geographic location exactly this building footprints belong to we can always right click and click zoom to layer and as you can see it's actually covering some parts of of new york so as you can see from here even though it doesn't cover each and every building uh you can see that the majority of the buildings have been actually digitized uh according to this file over here so the next thing that we need to do would be to export this into a kmz file so i'm going to go to export and save features as and from here i'm going to select keyhall markup language well in this case it's going to be a kml file and at the same time i'm going to set the projection to be wgs 1984 geographic coordinate reference system of which the epsd code is 4326 and i'm going to also give a file name for this building footprints but now in this case it's going to get saved as a kml file all right after that we can go ahead and click ok and once the export process has been completed we can head over to the folder itself and from here you can see with the google earth icon we have this building footprints file we can double click on that and that should sort of zoom me into the correct location just like this yeah now if i zoom in like this you can see that how accurately it got overlaid on top of these different buildings and with that i guess we reach the end of this tutorial which did consist of a number of parts and i believe this tutorial might just be the one single tutorial that you need to watch in order to grasp these concepts of handling files that belongs to different file formats that can be read by specific gis software packages and drafting software like autocad and i hope everything that was discussed was clear for you guys however if you do have any questions you can always add a comment down below and we will get back to you as soon as possible and always and always show your support by hitting that like button if you did really like the tutorial and with that it's going to be a wrap i'll see you again with another tutorial very soon

Channel: GeoDelta Labs

Views: 70,370

Keywords: google earth to autocad, autocad to google earth, qgis to autocad, autocad to qgis, arcgis to autocad

Id: cLM4_hx8-1o

Length: 38min 4sec (2284 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 15 2022