Place aerials, photos and logos, fade them with a mask, and shade a Civil 3D surface.
Image, on the DRAW tab, places a raster
image: an aerial, a site photo, a logo, a scanned base. PNG, JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF and WebP
are accepted, up to 50 MB per file. Images are embedded in the .asp, so the
project stays self-contained when you hand it to someone.
| Control | Notes |
|---|---|
| Opacity | Fade an aerial back so linework reads over it. In percent, as everywhere in the Studio: type a value in the box or drag the slider. |
| Blend | How the image combines with what is under it. Multiply darkens only, so white in the image leaves the sheet untouched. |
| Width / Height | In page units, with Lock Aspect Ratio on by default. |
| Rotation (degrees) | Rotate to match the drawing. A terrain has no size or rotation controls. |
| Info | Pixel dimensions and embedded size. Check this before shipping a project with several large images. |
| Mask | Clips the picture to a shape and fades it out to the shape's edge. See below. |
| Replace Image | Swaps the file while keeping the placement, size and rotation. Useful when the aerial gets updated. |
Images can also be scaled and rotated with the on-canvas handles, and moved like any other object. Double-click a picture for Quick Properties: these settings and its mask in a small window, with a preview.
A land-use or concept plan often sits on an aerial that fades to the white sheet round the site, or fades out behind the data table. The Mask group on the Image tab does this.
Pick a Shape: a Rectangle or Ellipse sits inside the picture by the Inset you give each edge, as a share of the picture's width or height; an Outline is a shape you click out on the canvas with the Mask Outline tool (right-click finishes, drawing again replaces it), or one the drawing already holds: From Outline arms a pick, and the smallest closed outline under your click (the site boundary, a shape drawn round the site in CAD or with the Path tool) becomes the mask, its arcs followed.
Feather is the width of the fade in page units. Measured in from the shape's edge, the picture is fully shown that far inside and gone at the edge, so a feather of 0 clips hard. With Fade outward on it is measured out from the edge instead: the picture is whole up to the outline and fades to the sheet beyond it, which is the look of an aerial clipped to the site boundary and faded from there. The picture's own Opacity sets how strong the aerial prints inside.
These are the picture's settings, saved with the drawing; a recipe never carries them, so each project fades its aerial as it needs.
The mask is measured on the picture, so it rides along when the picture is moved, resized or turned, and it stays with the picture through Replace Image and an Update from AutoCAD. While the picture is selected the outline shows dashed; it never reaches an export. A PDF carries the masked picture as one image with a soft mask, so the fade stays smooth at any zoom and adds little to the file. A terrain has no mask.
A Civil 3D surface exported with Shade Civil 3D surface is a terrain: Studio keeps its triangles and draws the ground from them. Select it in the scene tree (it usually lies under the whole plan, so a click or a marquee on the canvas passes over it to what is drawn there) to show the Terrain tab: opacity and blend as for an image, then these controls. The info line gives the triangle count and the range of elevations drawn.
A terrain stays where the export placed it, lined up with the plan through the viewport's scale and twist, so it has no width, height or rotation. It cannot be dragged, aligned, copied or turned from the TRANSFORM tab: moved or turned, it would shade the wrong ground and cast its shadows the wrong way. An Update from CAD places it again, and a drawing whose terrain was rotated in an earlier version opens with it turned back.
| Control | Notes |
|---|---|
| Relief shading | Shades the ground by its slopes. |
| Relief on | All ground (exaggerated) shades every slope. Graded sites fall 1 to 5 percent, which no light shows at true scale, so the relief is exaggerated; it draws where the terrain sits in the draw order, which is under the paving and planting. Steep ground only shades just the walls, curbs, ramps and banks, at their true slope, and leaves flat and gently graded ground white; it draws over paving, planting and linework, so a retaining wall or a pond bank shows through the fill around it. It also hides the crumpled facets that sparse survey data makes on open ground. |
| Steeper than (%) | Steep ground only: the slope where the shading starts. The default 8 takes in ramps, curbs, walls and banks; 25 (4:1) keeps only banks and walls. |
| Light | Multidirectional (USGS) lights each slope from whichever of four directions, south-west round to north, shows it best, as USGS relief maps do, so ground facing any way reads. North-west is the classic single map light. Look's sun lights the ground from the look's sun, set by hand or by date and time in Look Settings, so the terrain agrees with the building and tree shadows. A sun from the bottom of the sheet can make hollows read as mounds, which is why multidirectional is the default. |
| Relief strength | The vertical exaggeration. On all ground the starting point comes from the surface itself, enough for its grading to show. On steep ground it starts at the true slope, 1.0x. The readout gives the result, for example 3.1x vertical. Drag right for more. |
| Round off triangle facets | Shades the surface as rounded ground rather than as flat triangles. Sparse survey and surfaces built from contours leave large triangles whose edges draw as hard creases, a crease at every contour line and a flat plate on top of each rise; with this on, the creases fade away. Curbs, walls, steps and small triangles stay sharp, and the ground on either side of a wall keeps its own slope right up to it. Only the shading changes: heights stay as the surface has them, so objects standing on it and the shadows are where they were. Turn it off to see the triangles exactly as Civil 3D made them. On by default. |
| Walls and banks cast shadows | In a look that casts shadows, the steps and banks in the surface throw shadows from the look's sun onto the lower ground, at their true height and in the look's shadow color: a 5 ft retaining wall throws about 7 ft of shadow at a 35 degree sun. A wall facing the sun throws none, so which walls show depends on the sun; a morning or afternoon sun placed by date in Look Settings shows the ones the hand-set sun lights. On by default. |
| Elevation tint | Off, Smooth or Bands. Colours the ground from low to high, so the plan shows where the site is high and where it drains to. Bands break on round elevations. |
| Palette | Terrain (teal low ground to tan high ground), Earth (green to brown) or Cool to warm (blue to orange). |
| Tint strength (%) | How strongly the color shows. |
| Band interval | The height of each band in drawing units. Leave it blank for a round interval suited to the surface; the automatic value shows beside the box. |
| Tint range, low to high | The elevations the palette runs between. Blank uses the surface's own range, trimmed so a stray survey point does not stretch it. Type the same range on two surfaces to color them alike. |
A terrain comes in at 70% opacity with Multiply, and the settings survive an Update from CAD. Replace Image turns a terrain into an ordinary picture.
In Ink Sketch, Marker, Colored Pencil and Watercolor the relief is not a grey picture: it is drawn in the look's medium, as up to three coats of pencil, marker, wash or hatching laid over the shaded ground, lighter to darker, in the look's shadow color (see Render Looks). The relief settings above decide where the coats go; the opacity sets how strong they are. An elevation tint still draws as a picture under them. In CAD Line the surface draws nothing, relief or tint: the plot has no relief shading. The settings are kept and show again in any other look.
Steep relief and the surface's shadows lie on the ground: they draw over the paving, planting and linework and under the trees, shrubs, buildings and lettering. While either is on, the viewport draws its ground first and everything that stands up after it, whatever order the drawing gave them, so a hatch drawn over a tree in CAD no longer hides it.
Trees, buildings and walls given a height stand on the surface, and their shadows follow it: see Look Settings. Hiding the terrain's layer puts them back on flat ground.
A sheet exported with Capture paper space as background image carries the title block and border as a background layer. Toggle it with VIEW ▸ Background. It is the simplest way to keep the title block exactly as drafted while the drawing itself is rendered.