Employ Public Aerial Imagery in Civil 3D
9/1/2017
How to find and employ free public aerial imagery in Civil 3D
Autodesk's Alan Gilbert explains how you might search for, download, and employ aerial imagery from multiple sources in Civil 3D.
Alan covers the basic imagery functionality with and without Raster Design installed.
In other words, Alan also covers the Map 3D FDO (open source) Raster import method as well.
Video from Alan's YouTube Channel.
and the Civil Immersion blog.
See Alan's previous post on Bing Map Images with Assumed Coordinates
Comments
The methods discussed here require that you download the raster images. I suggest you employ a network project location.
Some of the public web resources may employ a published WMS web service. There are raster versions of this available from some ERSI sites and others. This data will load with the Map FDO WMS open source driver instead.
Sorry. That's a bit confusing and frustrating if you don't pay carefull attention to the specifics of the public data source.
Best as I can tell Autodesk seems to have stopped all internal development for any ESRI ArcGIS data sources above 10 and now relies only on the open source FDO drivers.