Street View inside the CAD

What it does

CAPCAD_GEO_STREETVIEW opens the CapStreetView palette and, inside it, a WebView2 browser that loads the Google Maps JavaScript API with a StreetViewPanorama. The palette is dockable (left and right), has an auto-hide button and a close button, and is one per session: running the command again only brings it back.

Before it opens, the command requires a coordinate system for the drawing, resolved in the usual order — active alignment → dwg setting → Civil 3D → whatever you supply. With no coordinate system the command ends silently, because nothing the palette does would make sense: turning the drawing's X,Y into latitude and longitude is the heart of all of it. See Coordinates and the coordinate system — and note that only some of the systems on offer actually resolve, so a drawing on BNG (the United Kingdom profile's default) never gets past this gate.

CAPCAD_GEO_STREETVIEW_PICK is the click loop, fired by the palette's Pick button or typed directly. On every click it:

1. reads the point in the drawing;
2. finds the foot of the perpendicular from the point onto the active alignment and takes the tangent direction there, turned into an azimuth (0° = north, clockwise) — with no alignment loaded, the heading is 0°;
3. converts X,Y into latitude and longitude using the coordinate system resolved when the palette opened;
4. draws the arrow at the point and takes the panorama there, already facing that azimuth.

The loop continues until you press Esc. A point that cannot be converted does not interrupt anything: the command line reports it and the loop carries on.

The other five commands are not for day-to-day typing — they are the entry points the palette and the drive use between themselves:

The three run commands only answer with the palette open.

Workflow

Checking points of the design

1. Have the active alignment and the coordinate system set.
2. Run CAPCAD_GEO_STREETVIEW. The palette opens floating; dock it to the right if you prefer.
3. Click Pick (6). The command line asks Pick a point (Esc to finish).
4. Click in the drawing. The panorama loads at that point, facing along the alignment, and the arrow appears in the drawing.
5. Click another point, and another. Esc ends the loop — the arrow stays where it was.
6. To go back to an older image, choose the date in History (7). The box goes yellow while you are not on the most recent image.
7. Capture (4) writes a PNG of what is on screen.

Driving the stretch

1. With the palette open, click Drive (5): it opens the alignment drive already set up for a run.
2. Tick Street View there and start. At every step the panorama jumps to the next point and the arrow follows in the drawing.
3. The date chosen in History is taken into account: at each point the command prefers the panorama of the year nearest the one you chose.

Walking in the panorama and seeing where that is in the drawing

1. Walk inside the panorama (Street View's own arrows).
2. On every change of position, the latitude and longitude come back to CapCad, are converted into the drawing's system, and the arrow moves there.
3. Turning the view turns the arrow, even without moving.

The palette

No screenshot. The numbers below follow the order in which the controls appear: the first strip has the coordinate box and five buttons, left to right; the second strip has the date list on the left and the mark button on the right; the rest of the palette is the panorama.

The palette keeps the chosen date from one click to the next: when you move to another point, it first looks for the same panorama and, failing that, the date nearest the one you had chosen. That is what stops it falling back to the most recent image at every new point.

The arrow in the drawing

The arrow is not a drawing entity: it is a transient object, drawn over the screen. It is not saved in the dwg, does not enter selections, is not plotted, and disappears when the palette is closed or hidden.

The arrow is fixed in drawing units: 10 units in a drawing in metres is a 10 m arrow, invisible at a whole-stretch zoom and enormous at a street-corner zoom. There is no scale factor.

How the palette and the drawing talk

The outward path — drawing to panorama — is always the same: X,Y → latitude/longitude → StreetViewPanorama.

The return path — panorama to drawing — has three variants, chosen by the kind of coordinate system in the session:

Two throttles keep the CAD from redrawing needlessly while you walk in the panorama:

• 250 ms between two arrow movements;
• about 2 m of minimum displacement (0.00002° in latitude and longitude) — the panorama fires its position event twice as it settles, and the second is discarded.

Turning the view does not go through those throttles: the arrow turns immediately, even when standing still.

Geolocating the drawing — CAPCAD_GEO_LOCATE_DRAWING

A sibling command with a different purpose: instead of bringing the photograph into the CAD, it tells AutoCAD where in the world the drawing is, so that the drawing's coordinates are the coordinates of the chosen UTM zone. That done, AutoCAD's native aerial imagery (GEOMAP) can be switched on over the design.

What it does, in order:

1. Checks the Autodesk sign-in (ONLINEUSERNAME). Without one, it says you need to sign in — and that a CAD restart may be needed — and ends.
2. The first time in each session, it shows the guidance to answer "Yes" to "Use geolocation data", opens the native GEOGRAPHICLOCATION dialog and ends. Run the command again to continue.
3. Resolves the coordinate system (alignment → dwg → last used → whatever you supply). Blank ends the command.
4. Translates it into the native identifier: BNG becomes BritishNatGrid; UTM-<zone><N|S> becomes UTM84-<zone><N|S>. A system that is not a valid UTM zone (1 to 60) stops the command with a message about the SIRGAS 2000 datum.
5. Shows the steps with three buttons — Prosseguir (continue), Cancelar and Video tutorial — once per session.
6. Writes the geolocation into the drawing: it erases any existing one, creates the new one, of grid type, with the design point on the zone's central meridian (E = 500,000 at latitude 40° N or 40° S; for the British case, the BNG calibrated point) and checks the result with a round-trip transformation.
7. Switches on the aerial imagery (GEOMAP in Aerial mode) and reports on the command line which system was applied.

It draws nothing and converts no geometry: it only records the location information. If the drawing is not really in that zone, the aerial image will appear displaced — the command does not check that.

Remembered between sessions

Nothing on this page is written to disk.

Within the CAD session, what is kept is: the coordinate system resolved on the last Pick (used by the panorama → drawing return), the preferred date/panorama from the History list, and, in CAPCAD_GEO_LOCATE_DRAWING, the fact that the first use has already happened and that the steps screen has already been shown. Close the CAD and all of that starts again.

The palette's position and size are kept by the CAD itself, as with any palette.

Notes

• It requires WebView2 and an internet connection. The palette uses Microsoft's WebView2 runtime and the Google Maps JavaScript API. With the runtime missing, the palette opens empty. With no network, the panorama stays dark.
• The palette opens at point (0, 0). On initialising, the browser loads latitude 0, longitude 0 — in the Gulf of Guinea, where there is no imagery. That is normal: the first Pick or Go takes it to the right place.
• The ⚑ Mark button is not available in this version.
• The AI Analyze button's analysis is not available in this version. It captures the PNG and shows a box with the file path. The capture itself is useful.
• After an AI Analyze, open Street View through Pick at least once before relying on the arrow moving.
• The return path needs a recognised coordinate system. When the coordinate system is neither a recognised UTM zone nor an AutoCAD geolocation, the panorama works and the outward path works, but the arrow does not move back — that return is not available in this version. Use an explicit UTM-<zone>.
• The arrow disappears when the palette is hidden or closed — including by the auto-hide button. That is intentional.
• Two things are not available outside AutoCAD. On the other four CADs, CAPCAD_GEO_STREETVIEW opens the palette without checking the coordinate system first (the palette opens; it is Pick that complains), and the internal: return path — the native geolocation — does not exist, leaving only the UTM-zone conversion.
• The Drive button is not available in this version outside AutoCAD.
• The palette is entirely in English, whatever the product language: Go, AI Analyze, Capture, Drive, Pick, History, Mark. So are the click loop's messages (Pick a point (Esc to finish), Convert failed…, No coordinate system for this drawing…).
• Most of CAPCAD_GEO_LOCATE_DRAWING's messages are Portuguese in an English session — only the Autodesk sign-in message and the "Use geolocation data" guidance are English-only. Its three buttons read Prosseguir / Cancelar / Video tutorial.
• The Video tutorial button of CAPCAD_GEO_LOCATE_DRAWING only opens the video in the Brazilian product. In every other language the button appears, ends the command, and opens nothing.
• CAPCAD_GEO_LOCATE_DRAWING ignores the coordinate system's datum. A UTM-<zone>S-SAD69 system is accepted and geolocated as if it were WGS-84. The SAD 69 → SIRGAS/WGS-84 difference reaches tens of metres: check the result.
• The first run of CAPCAD_GEO_LOCATE_DRAWING always ends without geolocating — it exists to open the native dialog once. Run the command twice.
• CAPCAD_GEO_LOCATE_DRAWING on ARES Commander is only a "coming soon" notice; on the other CADs it does not exist. The aerial imagery it switches on is an AutoCAD feature.
• For Street View opened in the browser rather than in the palette, see CAPCAD_GEO_LINK_STREETVIEW and CAPCAD_GEO_STREETVIEW_IMAGE in KMZ, geo formats and map links.