Tutorials

I’ve heard the question many times, and I’ve heard a lot of answers. “ESRI’s products make inaccurate maps”, claim some AutoCAD users, while some ArcGIS users feel that “AutoCAD ruins our coverages”.  In reality, BOTH families of products are excellent for certain tasks, and not so good for others, but the gap is closing and

If you are using Civil 3D or Land Desktop, it includes a version of Autodesk MAP, which provides a number of methods for dealing with digital maps from multiple coordinate systems. In addition to a wide variety of advanced import and export features, MAP 3D also provides the ability to convert coordinate systems through queries, automatically converting

Autodesk MAP includes the ability to properly insert a georeferenced image into a drawing.  A georeferenced image is one that has been scaled, rotated and (when necessary) “rubber-sheeted” into position to correlate to projected map features at a given scale. It may be an aerial photograph, a satellite image or even a scan of an

With the introduction of the Display Manager in Autodesk MAP 3D 2005, you now have a better way to create thematic maps from your AutoCAD drawings.  A thematic map uses properties like color and line width to display objects by data classifications. An example of this is a map of pipelines where you use different

Most maps need to convey a lot of information graphically. Even though many concepts such as location, shape, proximity and size are conveyed without text, a thematic or reference map often has hundreds or thousands of objects that need to be identified. One major goal of the cartographer is to accurately label all of these objects,

AutoCAD Map 3D, which is sold as a stand-alone application, but is also included with Land Desktop and Civil 3D, allows you to use queries.  Using queries, you can search through one or many drawings and identify, select, isolate, modify and/or copy drawing objects and extract information that would otherwise be extremely tedious and difficult to

TRANSFORM is a command in Map 3D (which is also a component of Land Desktop and Civil 3D), that has been around since the mid-1990s as an ADE (Autodesk Data Extension) tool.  It can be a time saver for editing tasks that require moving, copying and rotating one or more objects to fit other objects. It was originally

One of the many powerful features of AutoCAD Map 3D is Thematic Mapping, which allows you to quickly alter the way AutoCAD objects appear.  For instance, you can use it to display all of the lines on a sewer pipe layer using different colors, representing the size of each pipe. A major benefit of Thematic Mapping is that it does not permanently