Why use Raster Design?

Raster Design is misunderstood and underestimated, period. In the past, we’d purchase Raster Design for a single reason – it could transform coordinates on the fly. If you download a QUAD from the USGS, it’s likely in a UTM Zone – NAD 27. As most of us work in State Plane (in this day and age I hope you do), it’s always been nice to import QUADs or Aerials and transform them to state plane as they were imported, and it’s ridiculously simple:

When AutoCAD MAP was released, users seemed to forget about their good ol’ Raster, but missing from MAP (for a while) was the ability to transform coordinate systems without doing the attach and query dance. Once MAP had the ability to connect to data as shown below, images could finally be tranformed on the fly and unfortunately, several people shelved Raster Design – big mistake.

I recently visited with a firm doing pipeline work in a stretch of land that ran over 70 miles; a QUAD is about 7 1/2 miles wide; do the math and they’ll be importing 9 or 10 images to cover the area. If you’re importing quarter quads (like aerials), that’s 40 images to yield the same coverage, and you KNOW someone will need to see them in a single drawing (need obviously being a relative term).

Welcome Raster Design:

Import your images using Raster Design; crop them to cut out only the area(s) you need displayed; merge them together in a single, seemless, georeferenced image. MAP can’t do that.

ECWs and SIDs will need to be saved as a different format for obvious reasons, but choose the PNG format and cut down the image file size considerably.

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