Russ 3D Hybrids

Etude Number

4

Your name

Russell Etheridge

Your Pathway Combination

Digital Arts Specialist

The title of your etude

Sketch Up to Google Earth

A short statement of intentions

I have a keen interest in 3D applications and artistic implications of the technology. Due to the recent Sketch Up phenomenon, I wanted to see what all the hullabaloo was about and get to grips with the programme myself. Thus I decided to create my house in Sketch Up and upload it onto Google Earth.

Describe and depict what the actual concept of the etude is

The connection between Sketch Up, one of the most user friendly and efficient 3D modellers and Google Earth, a fantastic real time 3D version of Earth is a stroke of genius. It presents the possibility that one day everyone will have free access to a complete real time 3D version of our planet. When computers become powerful enough you could simply go on holiday in Google Earth rather than having all the hassle of booking flights and packing bags! Well maybe not that extreme but it certainly makes navigating easier. Imagine driving with a GPS device running something similar to Google Earth which contains highly detailed 3D data of all the landscapes and buildings which at that instant are passing by your window in real life.
My intention is to add to this burgeoning technology and create my own house for people to see in Google Earth. It will be useful for people trying to find my house who have never been there before to know what to expect before they arrive. In the process of doing this I will have learnt how to model and texture simple objects in Sketch Up and get to grips with the connectivity to Google Earth.

Documentation of Technical and Artistic Process

The most useful button in Sketch Up when creating a model for Google Earth is the ‘Get Current View’ button. It basically takes a screen shot of your current view in Google Earth and imports it to the 0, 0, 0 coordinates in Sketch Up ready for you to start building on top. It even imports terrain data. This can been seen in the screen shots of the finished textured house below.

To test out the modeling in Sketch Up I decided to build my whole house using only one object. And to my surprise it was particularly easy! Below is a screen shot of the finished model before I added any materials. (click on the image to enlarge)

I decided that to keep the model simple and easy to run on other computers I would take photos of all the sides of my house and texture the model with real images of such things as windows rather than modelling everything. Below are a couple of screen shots of the finished model with all the textures. (click on the images to enlarge)

A sunny day is not the best conditions to take photos for textures as you get really harsh shadows that may not match up to the light source in your scene. I do, however, think the overall effect is quite successful.

A screen shot of the finished model in Google Earth can be found in the following post:

Sketch Up Post

N.B. I don’t particularly want to give out my address on the internet, but if you had the 3DWarehouse connection .kmz open in Google Earth you would be able to find it if you knew where it was.

References

You can find all the related research and links in the following post category:

Sketch Up Category

How successful is the etude?

I think this etude was pretty successful. Although fairly straight forward, I did learn the basic ins and outs of modelling in Sketch Up and also got to grips with the Google Earth connectivity. The final model, although not millimetre accurate, is a pretty close representation of my house. If I get some spare time I think I will rebuild the house, re-texture it and create the front and back gardens. Up to now personal houses aren’t automatically coming with Google Earth so you don’t really have a limit to the complexity, so when I get round to it I may as well make it pretty detailed for the entertainment of friends and family.