Autocad Import Kml Direct

Lena had sighed. Put it into your CAD thing. She might as well have asked a baker to "just put the eggs into the cake."

First, she established the truth. She used GEOGRAPHICLOCATION to pin the drawing to the real world, importing the same satellite imagery as a live map backdrop. Now, AutoCAD knew it was in the same universe as Google Earth.

She held her breath.

The first attempt was a massacre.

AutoCAD chugged for a moment, then revealed its handiwork. The lodge polygon was a shattered mess of zigzags. The hiking trails had turned into straight-line chords that cut across mountain contours instead of following them. One trail plunged straight through the lake. The helipad wasn't a circle; it was a lumpy octagon that looked like a stop sign melted in the sun. autocad import kml

The yellow trails unspooled across the satellite image, following the terrain perfectly. The lodge polygon snapped into place, its edges clean and closed. And the helipad—the red circle was a true circle, mathematically round, hovering over the ridge like a promised sunrise.

The KML—Keyhole Markup Language—was a creature of the sky. It lived in the curved, spherical world of Google Earth, where lines were drawn on a globe and "straight" was an illusion. AutoCAD lived on the flat, rational Cartesian plane of X and Y. Converting one to the other was like ironing a crumpled map of the world. Something always got stretched. Lena had sighed

She knew the enemy now: projection. Google Earth used WGS84, a geographic coordinate system based on latitude and longitude on a sphere. Her drawing was set to State Plane, a grid designed to minimize distortion over a small area. The KML had been flattened like a pancake, and all the juicy terrain data had squirted out the sides.