Here are a few things that I think need to happen to make annotations much more beneficial. @Jamespipe @Andrew_Fraser
- Multi-point line profiles. (We’ve discussed this one at length and it needs to happen ASAP. Competitors have been doing it for a while. This is a big deal for anyone does roadways, utilities or corridor work.)
- Symbols. (We need the ability to choose a symbol at least for the location pin. There are many things that we annotate that already have specific symbols in the design world. Here are examples of a few things that we regularly locate and/or count.
A. Light Poles
B. Power Poles
C. Valves
D. Vaults
E. Trees
- Symbol Scale (It would be nice to have the ability to change the symbol scale for visibility and prominence. IE, the count dot is way to small. On a 4K monitor. This includes lines thickness.)
- More colors. (Use the colors that are available in materials. I don’t understand why this wasn’t included in the update.)
- Transparency. (Some are already solid and some are transparent so why not.)
- GCP’s (A layer needs to be selectable to show our GCP’s!)
- Hover Captions (It would be nice to be able to have (or not have) the descriptions pop-up without having to open the object.)
Thanks for the progress over the last year! All, let’s keep it going. Keep adding you suggestions and I will make a comprehensive list to vote on and then submit.
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An addition to the improvements list I just came across. I am trying to put together a 5 minutes video for client onboarding and noticed (again) that Annotations layers do not function properly. Clicking the checkbox off still does not turn off all layers so that individuals can be easily turned on and vice-versa when re-selected does not turn everything on. I will note that this is on a View-Only link, but some of this behaviour does exist in paid accounts.
It would also be nice for materials in particular if there was a category instead of just the individual check boxes.
@Jamespipe @Andrew_Fraser
Next would be the inability to deselect and annotation. Once selected from the map window the vertices show up and the calculation is populated on the left-hand pane. You have to refresh the page for the selection visual to go away. You cannot simply back out of it and no other navigation is apparent to get out.
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I second line thickness for shapefiles. I can hardly see them when zoomed in. Michael you could do hydrants with custom tiny PDF’s I would assume. Annotations need to be improved and it would be amazing if we could have more control of what prints on reports.
That’s an interesting option, but a time-consuming one. In Civil design there are a standard set of symbols and abbreviated naming conventions for all of these objects and one thing I have always steered DroneDeploy towards is standardization with the existing world. This includes allowing DXF imports of linework, but more importantly surfaces. Shapefiles are pretty week for accuracy in the surface modeling world and are rarely used in Surveying and Construction that I have experienced. DXF CAD files are a “dumb” agnostic file format that pretty much every CAD program can export and import. Even free ones.
Not to mention to make the shapefiles you pretty much have to do it layer by layer. I finally figured out the best workflow for it. You have to make sure that you assign the CRS in Civil3D to get all the correct files. Then just MAPEXPORT to shapefile and zip it up. Typically you also have to explode the line work also. I should probably make a tutorial for this.
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Exactly! The whole point of standardization falls when integrating data. Seems counter-intuitive.
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