one of my secrets is i go into google earth, zoom into the scale i want, turn off all the background info (compass, roads, etc.), then take partial screen shots of the area i'm interested in. then i go into photoshop and stitch them all together. you can get very high resolution aerials that way.

but, shhhhhh, don't spread it around.

yeah thats one i have done as well in the past
does google earth only give you plan views? or are there any perspective views available? i cant remember, and will have to check it out tonight

know of anything for like skyline views or others like that?

microsoft live search has aerial photography @ various angles.

ah yes, how did i forget about that
thanks zaphod
i remember using microsoft live a couple years ago in school

Google actually now had a feature that is called Street view and you can actually see real photographs of streets in major cities! It is really cool. You can even spin around 360 degrees and see the numbers on houses. Right now they only have major cities photographed though.

i think it would be pretty cool if they had
other cities like lagos or maybe pyongyang
who cares about paris? we already know what they look like

just keep renewing the google earth pro tryouts (7 days at a time) - that way you can get the second-highest res level avail in "Save As Image" menu.

Hmmm....Google Earth! Sketchup! I am doing a project at school...

In a sense I want lay a kind of contextual blanket over a city to study the slopes of different heights of buildings.

Is there a way to use google Earth and export a whole city into sketchup so I can export it to dwg? I don't use sketch-up so I just want to export it as a .dwg

Any thoughts?

I already have the entire city in 2D from the planning dept. but the problem is that is is in 2D.

I want to build a physical model of this but I need a 3 dimensional map to start with. Basically this is to study all of the slopes of height changes in the whole city and how they relate or don't relate to the site which is an esplanade park.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. If I can't do this with google earth and sketch up then I will have to extrude the 2D cad bldg. foot prints based off of looking at google earth and approx. heights.

Thanks!

programs Like Google earth use open gl calls back to the servers and there are programs floating around the net used to intercept open gl and save it to an object file. I stripped NYC and Chicago a couple years ago from google earth 4 i think. The problem is I have a 75 mb file that is almost infinently huge amount of faces to deal with. If you can tweak the system files to keep, disgard etc or or ignor planes you can get cleaner files than I but after about 4 weekends straight of tweaking the code i extruded a basemap. I got a nice render out of blender of Chicago though.

I have it at work, chack in tomorrow I might still have it on my system

EvilPlatypus,

I think I might just extrude the key buildings I need as masses. This is for Boston. There are not a ton of tall buildings. It is just a study model I am making so I don't want to spend too much time on it and not have time for the other dozens of study models.

Pretty cool technique you used though! I thought maybe there was an easy way to do this with google earth and sketch up...but I guess not.

Thanks for the help!

I would like to TRY to do this though EvilPlatypus! What programs are floating around that can intercept open gl and save it to an object file. Would you be willing to tell me how you did this? Thanks!

hmm...this is where I usually turn to my data pusher...every arch student needs one.
but being completely ignorant of the size of your site, i would just get on with extruding the buildings. sometimes pushing ahead and using bruteforce is the quickest way. chances are, the finer the data you have, or believe you have, the more picky you'll get about your digi 3d model and hours, days, weeks will drift by as you silently whisper "...just one more tweak" to yourself. my 2 cents.
sounds like you'd need the topology as well anyway - unless your city is completely flat at the ground...? (are we responding to marmkid or nRyArch now!!!?)
nRyArch: "I would like to TRY to do this"

SavedByTech,

Thanks for the help! That is exactly what I was looking for. I am not going to use this for the city versus building slope Study because you are right that it would take way too long to do that. It is supposed to just be a quick study model. I appreciate your advice of just jumping right into it and not thinking about it too much!!! That is excellent advice!!!

I bought some cheap pink r5 foam insulation from home depot for about $7 and I am going to quickly carve out the tallest building or structures to get a quick study model. I just want to see all of the tall structures in comparison to the esplanade park along the Charles River and not being exact is fine!

I think I will use this Google earth building export technique to study the relationship of the buildings in Back Bay part of Boston in the more focused area of the site. Thanks a lot for the help! I love archinect!!! It is such a great place to share ideas!!!

Is there a way to get the 3D topography of the site area from Google earth for the area around my site? That would really help me with my full site model. Any help with finding the best place to get that in 3D would be appreciated too!

Thanks!!!!