Google Earth 5.0 released – How to get it to work with Civil 3D

One of my personal favorite features of Civil 3D is how it integrates with Google Earth.  Being able to grab this data for preliminary planning is such a powerful tool, and one that I hope you are all taking advantage of.

Well, the latest version of Google Earth was released today and it has some great new features.  Check out the video at the bottom for a preview of the goodies.

What you need to know, however, is that Google made some changes starting in version 4.3 that threw a monkey wrench into how the Surface data gets brought in.  You may have noticed that you get stuck at 49% during the import.  Unfortunately, Google stayed with their changes, which means we need to modify some settings in your drawing to allow the Surface import.

• In the Drawing Settings, expand Surface, and then Commands (see image above)
• Here you will see 2 commands
  • ImportGEData
  • ImportGESurface
• Click on each to modify them.  Look under “Google Earth Options” and you will see a value of 100 for both Rows and Columns.  Change this to 70 for each (see image below).
• You will need to do this for both ImportGEData and ImportGESurface

This is drawing specific, so make sure to change this in your Template file!

Preview of the new features in Google Earth 5.0

Note: For information regarding the use of the data obtained from Google Earth, please refer to this document provided by Google: http://earth.google.com/intl/en-US/license.html