In Siteworks you can load a Background Image e.g. of an Orthophoto or a PDF Page that can be used as a reference by the Siteworks User.
To create the image in TBC, I recommend working on a White Background, turn off everything except the data that you want in the image that you are going to capture i.e. if you have CAD linework, Text or any other CAD object visible it will be incorporated in the image that is captured.
You will need a Plot Box (use the Plot Box command to create a Plot Box around the area of the TBC Plan View that you want to capture in the image. You can create the plotbox and then change the Scale or the Width / Height values in the Plotbox Properties to make it the correct size. The Plotbox itself is ignored in the Image Capture so it can be visible when the image is created.
When creating the Plotbox it asks you for the Scale that you “want to plot to” e.g. 1"=50’ - if you select 50 then enter 10" and 10" for the Plotbox Width and Height it will create a Plotbox 500’ x 500’ (10"x50’). If you change the Plotbox Scale to 100 then the Plotbox will be 1000’ x 1000’. If you then change the Plotbox Width and Height to 5" and 5" then you will be back at 500’ x 500’.
When you capture the image it asks you for the DPI you want to use - if your Plotbox is 10" x 10" and you select 120 DPI then you will have 1200 x 1200 pixels in the output image which is well within the limits of Siteworks 8192 x 8192 pixels.
So if you keep your Scale at 100 and you always use 120 DPI then your Plotbox Width and Height Maximum is going to be 68.27 x 68.27" however I recommend going to 80% of this which would be 54.61" x 54.61"
Remember the following
- The plotbox scale defines the area that will be captured in the image (Scale x Width or Scale x Height)
- The DPI defines the resolution of the image created - 120 DPI is normally good enough
- The plotbox width and height define the number of pixels in width and height (DPI x #of Inches)
The enclosed calculator may be useful to help you compute the plotbox size for the area that you are interested in capturing
Siteworks Image Size Calculator v2.xlsx (11.1 KB)
Here are the details
The Max pixel resolution is 8192x8192 in either direction for Width and Height.
You should try to keep things somewhere below that for performance reasons, depending on the controller in use in the field (Tablet, TSC7 etc.). Android oerating systems platforms have a kind of a “dynamic” limit that will be somewhat under those dimensions, depending on the device, so just best to try to keep things as high-res as you need for your purposes, but not maxed out just because you can… I’ve found that using the TBC exporter at the max 300DPI gives a good image. Note that at 300 DPI the image area needs to be smaller than at 120 or 96 DPI output to be within the image size limits.
The image can be any kind of raster format, JPG, TIF, BMP, GIF and just needs the associated identically named world file (JGW, TFW, BPW, GFW) in the same “Background Images” folder that Siteworks creates in the Project directory. You can have multiple images in the folder, just need to make sure that each image has its associated world file in there. The world file is created by the Capture Image command when the project has a defined coordinate system or site calibration, and when the data being captured is in the correct NE coordinate range for that coordinate system. You can check that this is setup correctly by turning on the Background Map service in TBC to make sure that your PDF or Orthophoto is in the right location geographically.
Remember that PNG images have transparency - that can be helpful in some situations e.g. when you want to open the captured image in Google Earth.
For now it’s a manual import of the images, in that TBC does not create the Background Images folder in the directory structure when syncing. I just tested and confirmed that when you create a new project in Siteworks that will indeed produce the Images folder. Once that’s there, you can either just move the images into the folder. Or also you can in Siteworks go into the map options tab (the gear icon in lower right of main Plan View screen) hit the “Images” tab and add an image by using the “+” button and navigate to it on the device. If you do it that way, Siteworks will copy the Image and World file from the source location into the background images folder. Just have to make sure that wherever your source image is the world file is in the same folder…
TBC creates the image outputs in the Project Folder in a subfolder called Snapshots. Copy the image and the associated world file to the siteworks project folder and place in the background images folder.
If you create an image and it is too large, you will just need to change the plotbox size and position and create another image - it is kind of trial and error as to what width and height of plotbox works to create the right size image. If you open the image in Paint - Paint can tell you the number of Pixels in Height and Width that you have in the file - adjust from there.
Hope that this helps
Alan