Google Building Maker

[rcallicotte]

http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/10/introducing-google-building-maker.html

[Jack]

sweet! looks good but its google so no suprise their!

[latego]

More than anything else, it is a case study into using people's vanity to make them work for nothing for you ; the end result will be Google Earth full of childish parallelepipeds which are not, by any measure, a model of a building.

Bye...

[rcallicotte]

What I'm hoping is that someone figures out a way to take these buildings and provide the end results in Object format.  Well...I can hope, right?

[dandelO]

Google Sketchup has an .obj exporter, if these items are added to the Goggle 3D Warehouse, any one of them would be able to be made workable in TG.

Actually, it says so here on their page, too...

Here are some more things you should know about Building Maker:

    * Building Maker is an online tool, and it runs entirely in your web browser (Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, etc.)
    * Before you can add a building to Google Earth, you need to sign in to your Google Account (so you get credit for what you contribute).
    * Models you create with Building Maker "live" in the Google 3D Warehouse (a giant, online repository of 3D models).
    * You can use Google SketchUp (our free, general-purpose 3D modeling tool) to edit or otherwise modify anything you make with Building Maker.
    * Make sure you have the latest version of Google Earth installed on your computer.
    * If you're on a Mac, you need to download the Google Earth plug-in directly.

Building Maker is free and available in 14 languages. Go to www.google.com/buildingmaker to join the worldwide mapping community. Have fun!

[dandelO]

Google Sketchup also exports perfectly to Terragen. All textures intact upon TG import.

[rcallicotte]

Let's see.  Do you have a render yet?  If so, and you have time, can we see the quality?  I can't try it where I am.

Google Sketchup also exports perfectly to Terragen. All textures intact upon TG import.

[dandelO]

Not of any buildings, I don't, Calico. I have used GS for a while, though, and have found no problems in the way it writes object material files.
Exporting from GS6 creates the .obj, .mat and a seperate folder with all the textures in it as defaults.
The filepaths don't even need to be reassigned when using the object in TG.(alpha and bump probably still do, not sure).

The 3D Warehouse is very large and completely free, aswell. There's still some fair amount of bumff in there but I'll grab a decent looking building and try a render. Report back later...

[dandelO]

I didn't need to import/fix any textures for this free downloaded house from Google's warehouse but you'll see there are more than a few issues evident with exporting a downloaded building from the 3D Warehouse and taking it straight into TG. It might be ok for other free building downloads but this particular building is most definately flawed.
I wondered if putting it through Poseray would have helped, I resolved 'no' because it doesn't just appear to be inverted normals or anything like that, some entire faces are completely missing, I done some backwards angles to check this but the faces are completely gone...

[attachimg=#]

However, I do have some other objects from there, cars and such, and they always seem to be perfect coming out of Sketchup and straight into TG.
Hmmm... I wonder if I built a building in Sketchup, knowing that it was done correctly, would it suffer these problems upon exporting to another application? Don't know. I might give it a go if I have some free time at any point, not today. Can't be arsed!

Sketchup has a few really cool features but mostly, I've found, it is lacking in areas that would be of great use. For instance, I don't know, or can't find, how to create object hotpoints, get true scale values, get true xyz POSITION values, etc. etc. etc.

This building appeared to be perfect within Sketchup, no missing faces. It could be viewed from all angles fine.

Issues.

[akira_marsh]

Will you excuse suddenly from the side.
Google Sketchup is likely to have a few bugs in the .obj output.
http://sketchup.google.jp/support/bin/answer.py?answer=114389&&hl=en

Converted to another format first, go well with other software to convert again.

May have been a strange statement of machine translation so.

[dandelO]

So, is it just .obj that has these issues, Akira_Marsh?
Could we export as .lwo fine? I suppose I could test it just now, I can't remember if there's an LWO export function in GS6.

[Kadri]

İ think Google Sketchup models would be useful from distance.
Dandelo have you tried it in a big picture? How would it look (in spite of the errors)?

Kadri.

[dandelO]

I'm editing the same model to make it .3DS(no .lwo exporter). I'll Poseray it and test again...

[dandelO]

Yup, everything is fine. I took the steps above ^^ and poseray made it workable without the need to change any settings in either Poseray or TG on import, at all.

House in TG, all textures/faces intact.
[attachimg=#]

Model from here... http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=39d6a312cb71102ea62bef0f3f3147ae&prevstart=0

Since the Google 3D Warehouse is completely free and public, there should be no problem if I share the .tgo'd model, there are no notes to accompany it stating otherwise. If anyone knows different, please let me know and I'll remove it again.
It's just the house, I removed very much of the scene, like plants, fences, terrain.
It isn't true scale, go for 0.1 scale, all round, in a TG scene. It also floats above the ground so alter the Y transform to '-0.1'(if rescaled, -1 if not). Sketchup's controls are very... 'sketchy'.

If you need to credit someone if it's used it'd be simply 'Nick046' who created the original Sketchup scene. Because of the way that the warehouse works, though, I'm not even sure that this is necessary, he did simply make it out of other peoples components himself. I don't know.

Here's the .tgo and maps... http://stonefingerii.googlepages.com/2bedroomranchhouse.rar

Edit: Apparently, it has interior aswell. I've not looked inside yet, you'd need to fix the windows and add some indoor lights to do this.

[rcallicotte]

dandelO, this changes everything.

Thanks for all of your efforts.  Wow.  I didn't expect a night's project, but thanks. 

What I'm wondering is if we wanted to do fly-overs or something that is from a distance, if these buildings might really help a scene that has realistic landmass.  This would apply to anyone wanting to do anything professionally, as well.  In my mind, it changes what we need to do to get the job done.

When you say you edited the model to .3DS, did you use Sketchup?