COVER STORY

SketchUp and Building Maker

Building Maker is a god gifted assistance of SketchUp. Our very own magic tool has a great companion who can hit the right chord to produce the world in 3D. Building Maker is a 3D modeling tool which can be used to draw 3D model of existed building on Google Earth. Earlier this tool set worked using a browser and Google Earth plugin. But with the advance version of SketchUp 8, Building Maker can be launched inside of it. This is a super specialized online tool for creating building on Google Earth.

You can choose a building which you want to model by looking at aerial imagery in Building Maker. When you decide that which building you want to be modeled, building maker loads up several different aerial views of that building taken from different directions. Then you have to align simple 3D shapes - boxes, prisms, pyramids and others - to the different views. The photo-texturing can be done by goggle Building Maker by itself by using the aerial photos to 'paint' your building when you will save it. The models which are created by the users automatically find place in Google 3D Warehouse. But the best thing is it is also automatically considered for inclusion on the 3D building layer in Google Earth. If the model will pass the parameter of Google and there is no better model on that place, your model will appear in Google Earth for millions of viewers within about a week.

But what is the relation between SketchUp and Building Maker? SketchUp is a 3D designing tool by which you can draw almost anything and everything - from a nail to the U.F.O. But Building Maker is far more specialized in this field. It is used only to draw building on Google Earth. Building Maker is not a competitor of SketchUp; rather it is the companion which just enhances its functionality. Both are working hand in hand - together. You can create a building in Building Maker. After finishing you can download and open the model on SketchUp. Then you can make the building better by tweaking textures, refining the geometry. After completion just uploaded your edited and upgraded model to the 3D Warehouse and the chance of being accepted by Google has increased much. In this way SketchUp and Building Maker work together to produce more realistic 3D models of house.

Building Maker is an online application which means it runs entirely on the web browser like Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and all the other browsers. First of all you have to sign in your Google account. The latest version of Google Earth is the best for Building Maker. Mac users have to download Google Earth plug in directly. This free application is available in 14 different languages. But SketchUp 8 upgraded the system and made some change.

SketchUp 8 has the inbuilt geo-modeling facility which helps building Maker to do its work more easily. The Get Snapshot command has been replaced with the new Add Location command. In the previous version of SketchUp, the users had to open the Google Earth but in the new version an integrated Google Map has opened where they can enter the address or post code to display an aerial view of where the building is or will be situated. The Get Region command is helpful to get the full color aerial shot along with terrain and geo-location data into SketchUp to use as the basis for your work.

And there is a short cut to make it fast. You can add a basic box modeled version of your building in Building Maker. Then just open the model on SketchUp 8 to revamp with the Photo Texture command to open another window where you can see the same geo location using Google Street Viewer. You can now explore the area to find out the best view of the building and take snapshots that are applied to your model currently selected faces to bring it quickly to life. Building Maker helps you to add boxes, gables and blocks to build the geometry of the building, which you can align with Google's multiple angled aerial shots of the area. You can also save the geo-reference model to Google's 3D Warehouse and export it into SketchUp.

Apart from this, a number of further advances have been made for the fine tuning purpose. The Igloo tool help you to see each of the Building Maker images associated with your model hovering over it. You can then navigate between images and use SketchUp's enhanced Match Photo tool lets you quickly remove unwanted internal geometry from buildings you've downloaded. With the help of Outer Shell tool you can quickly remove unwanted internal geometry from building which you have downloaded. This tool shows how SketchUp 8 is no longer limited to treating models as connected faces and can now think of them as solid objects. Google SketchUp 8 has the capability of to display currently obscured edges as dashed lines, an enhanced Scenes Panel with scene preview thumbnails and a Push/Pull tool that can now work interactively or with pre-selected faces.

Various cities like Amherst, Massachusetts, Washington, DC, Brussels, Belgium, Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Cologne, Germany; Dortmund, Germany; Boston, MA, USA; Las Vegas, NV, USA; Los Angeles, CA, USA; San Jose, CA, USA and many more. The latest new cities in Building Maker are Rome, Italy; New Orleans, Louisiana; Long Beach, California and Malibu, also in California. London 3D Project is going to convert the London in to 3D on Google Earth. Hope that we will soon see the whole world on 3D.