Wanting to get away from Raster Design

[Jaelin]

I wasn't sure whether this should be posted here or under "Software and Licensing" but decided here might be better.

With the work I do I have to insert aerial photography behind my drawing files for reference. The images are .SID files. These aerials are done by our county property appraiser's office and show an entire township (6 square miles) of land. Yearly we pay for 8 licenses of Raster Design to insert these aerials. This is all we use Raster for is to insert these aerials. My question is: Is there a way to get around having to use Raster? We use Civil 3D Land Desktop companion but are moving to straight Civil 3D next year. These aerials with Raster automatically insert to a designated coordinate system. The problem I'm running into when I use the basic Raster Image Reference command (which I believe to be a straight AutoCAD command, not a Raster command) is I get an aerial that comes inserted in the wrong place and scaled way down. Does anybody know a way to get around this or to insert these images without having to use Raster??

[rustysilo]

You certainly don't need Raster Design to just import them. Instead of doing it via the typical image attach you have to insert them through the Map menu. Map > Image > Insert and then you'll see that it gives options on placement and such. If your world file is in the same directory with the image it should already note that and place it properly based on your coordinate system settings. The only thing you will likely need to do is install the Raster Design object enablers for Civil 3d. This allows you to attach the other formats such as jpeg2000, mrsid, etc.

[Jaelin]

Awesome!! Thank you very much, that is extremely helpful!

[Xenophon]

if you use a bitmap (2 colors) see adobe photoshop image, Mode, bitmap, you can have your raster take the color of the layer