Google 3d

This is my distraction for this week.

Google announced they are making available the tools they have been using internally to create 3D images of buildings for Google Earth (NOT Google Maps).   If you have a reasonably fast computer and graphics card (or patience), you can volunteer to work for Google for Free!

Caution: If you watched the movie Battle of the Bulge or study World War II history, you probably are aware that as US troops were advancing on Germany, English speaking Germans (some of whom had lived in the United States) were sent to infiltrate the advancing US forces, and turn road signs around, give wrong directions and generally confuse the Americans who couldn’t read their maps or didn’t trust them.  The Russians were legendary for deliberately publishing wrong maps in case the Germans invaded some day (before satellites) .    So by “helping” Google identify buildings and pin down the 3D models, some day if alieans from Outer Space or Blue Helmets from the New World Order show up in America, this information will be quite helpful.

The process is moderately straight forward.   You go to the start page:

http://sketchup.google.com/yourworldin3d/index.html

and download a free utility called SketchUp, although you may not need it.   You go to a part of the world that interests you and start work.   Only certain cities have enough coverage so far to make this work.   You may have read that Google is acquiring “Drones” in order to gather aerial photography more cheaply.

If the area is covered, you pick the building you want to tackle, and it presents you with 6 (or more) different views of the building.   You start making a 3D model – normally what this means is breaking the building into “boxes” starting from the ground floor up.   You drag the corners of the box to match the picture.   You then repeat it through the other pictures taken from different angles.   The more you line things up, the better it understands the shape of the building.   Once you have the important parts of the structure pinned down (constrained), you “Save” the model – Google takes what you did, grabs the “faces” of each part of the building from the images you used, and creates a moderately realistic image – if you did a good enough job, Google will add it to Google Earth for the 6+ billion people of the world to admire.

This is my bit of obscure modeling.    Pittsburgh is where I grew up, and an important part of the development of the “South Hills” was construction of the Liberty Bridge and Tunnels which cuts several miles off the trip to the South, since you drive under Mount Washington.   Up on the hill (near South Hills Junction on fhe streetcar/LRV lines) are some really odd looking buildings.   What is there in the middle of this residential neighorhood is the ventilation system for the tunnels.   If you don’t remove the exhaust gases from tunnels used by trucks and cars, it becomes a problem for the people in the tunnel.   So there are 4 towers that stick up 110 feet in the air tha exhaust the fumes up into the air, hopefully high enough that the people living nearby don’t get sick 🙂   This is one of the 4 towers.   I’m not very good at “art”, made of Stone or otherwise.    But if you have Google Earth, you should be able to see my Stone Artwork as it appears in real life (more or less)  [View in Google Earth] or [View in 3D Map].    You can also incorporate images from Google Street view to get a clearer image (which I did).   Feel free to try the other towers 🙂   Although I suspect they are all identical and the same model would work nicely for all of them….

If you are modeling a more complex building or one in a part of the country without good photo coverage – but particularly if you have access to the building and can take your own pictures, Sketchup lets you create an accurate 3D model by hand.