![]() But you can get great results in the end.ĭaniel Tal, ASLA, is a professional speaker and a registered landscape architect with over 17 years of experience. To test things out, switch the visibility of the Google Earth terrain and snapshot layers and see if things line up correctly.Īs you can see, a lot of moving parts. The aerial should drape onto the terrain, correctly located and scaled. Then click the Skelion rectangle to apply the image. Get the eye dropper back again, and sample the aerial image. This is necessary for the projected terrain to display correctly. This will select all the terrain faces and the hidden edges that compose the terrain. Edit this group and be sure to Select-triple-click on the surface. Make the “Skelion Terrain” layer visible. Right-click on the rectangle face and choose Texture / Projected. ![]() Now comes the final, rewarding step! Open the aerial rectangle for editing (right-click on it and choose Edit Group). But take the time to match as best you can. Again, don’t shoot for 100% accuracy – that’ll be very frustrating. That group should be locked anyway to prevent this from happening.) Then use the Scale tool to adjust the size. (You should never move the Google Earth snapshot itself – that’ll freak out SketchUp to no end. Use the M ove tool to position the rectangle to match the Google Earth snapshot. Open the Scenes window and click the “plus” icon. In case you accidentally orbit out of plan view, you can click the scene tab to return. It’s a good idea to save this plan view as a scene. This establishes a true, orthographic plan view. Go back to Top view, and choose Camera / Parallel Projection. Open the Edit tab of the Materials / Colors window, and reduce the Opacity to make the image translucent. This makes the snapshot’s image the active material. With the Paint Bucket sampling tool (PC: the eye dropper on the Materials window, Mac: hold the Cmd key while Paint is active), click the Google Earth snapshot. Scaling this way isn’t 100% perfect, but it comes pretty close. To bring the aerial to the correct size and location, we’ll use the Google Earth snapshot. Select-double-click the newly-painted rectangle, then right-click on it and choose Make Group. Double-click to paint the image onto this face – the image should fit the extents of the rectangle. Browse to the high-res image you saved from Google Earth Pro, and import it as a texture (not an image).įind the bottom left corner of the large rectangle. In SketchUp, choose File / Import and set the import file type to JPG. The center of this view should match the original terrain imported into SketchUp from Google Earth.Įxport the image ( File/ Save Images), using the maximum resolution available. Set up the view to more or less match the Skelion terrain. Open Google Earth Pro and navigate to the location of the aerial image in your model. All you should see now is the new rectangle and the Google Earth 2D snapshot. In the Layers window, hide the “Skelion Terrain” layer. Place this rectangle under the Skelion terrain. With the R ectangle tool, draw a face larger than the Skelion terrain area. Switch to plan view ( Camera / Standard Views / Top). Use this window to place the terrain on its layer. Right-click on the Skelion terrain and choose Entity Info. Turn off the “Google Earth Terrain” layer (the 3D terrain) and display the “Google Earth Snapshot” layer (the 2D terrain).Ĭreate a new layer (click the “plus” icon) and name it “Skelion Terrain.” Make sure that Use maximum texture size is checked, to provide the highest resolution for the aerial. ![]() If you want to work through these steps yourself, go back to Part 1 and use that information to create a SketchUp model that has both Google Earth and Skelion terrain.įirst, open the Preferences (PC: Window / Preferences, Mac: SketchUp / Preferences) to the OpenGL page. ![]() (This all sounds intimidating but it’s really not so bad.) Once placed, the aerial will be scaled and projected onto the Skelion terrain. In the process described below, I’ll show how to draft a large surface used for importing a high-res aerial into SketchUp. The process is relatively simple, though there are a lot of steps. You get just the terrain. Fortunately Google Earth Pro, which is now free, allows you to download and import aerials and maps up to 4k in resolution. I use these types of aerials to create detailed context models in Lumion. But the Skelion terrain map does not come in with an aerial image, or an actual map draped onto the surface. While Add Location limits you to one square mile of imported terrain, Skelion is able to bring in tens, even hundreds, of square miles. This produces a much larger terrain area than what you could import using SketchUp’s Add Location tool, which imports data from Google Earth. In Part 1 of this series, I showed how to use the Skelion extension to import terrain into SketchUp.
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