Large terrain photo help

olishea · 8 Mar 2013, 18:29

watch this, very funny series called "You suck at Photoshop"

This is is about photomerge and google earth

Aureus · 8 Mar 2013, 18:32

It always worked for me. Just turn off everything you can from Google Earth. You don't need those image icons, right?

I don't know for the tutorials.

A quick tip:

Open an SU file, open Google Earth. Zoom over the area you need in Google Earth but not in the way that you encompass everything you need, just one part of it.
Press 'Get Current View' in SU and you'll have your first image.
Back to Google Earth, move about and find new view. Make sure that one pert overlaps with the previous one.
Press 'Get Current View' in SU and you'll have the second image.
Repeat those steps until you have all the area in SU.
You'll see several photos piled up in correct position to each other.

Then you can use them for whatever you want.

solo · 8 Mar 2013, 18:45

I'm having a serious blond moment here, I open SU and I open Google earth as a seperate program or do I use the Google earth in SU and it opens a small applet where I insert location and get a choice to select region? (if it's that then that does not work well for what I need)

Where is the "get current view"?

Aureus · 8 Mar 2013, 18:51

You open them as separate programs.
In SU 7 'Get Current View' is View/Google/Get Current View.
In SU 8 I think that 'Add Location' has the same function as 'Get Current View' but I'm not totally sure since at the moment I don't have Google Earth to try that.

Chris Fullmer · 8 Mar 2013, 18:53

Its the one that is completely drive from within SU. Press the icon for "add location". That brings up the window with a map. Navigate to where you want. Then set the pins and click grab or whatever it says. Thing is, you can do that over and over and over. So zoom in so that you get high quality images, and then tile them together by importing multiple zoomed in pieces.

Aureus · 8 Mar 2013, 18:56

@chris fullmer said:

Its the one that is completely drive from within SU. Press the icon for "add location". That brings up the window with a map. Navigate to where you want. Then set the pins and click grab or whatever it says. Thing is, you can do that over and over and over. So zoom in so that you get high quality images, and then tile them together by importing multiple zoomed in pieces.

True. In SU8 this can be done from within SU entirely.

I'm just accustomed to do it in SU7.

Chris Fullmer · 8 Mar 2013, 18:58

Yeah, I kind of preferred the old way as well. I think the major improvement is just that you no longer need Google Earth installed to make it work.

solo · 8 Mar 2013, 19:00

Ah, thanks guys I'll give it a go.

Aureus · 8 Mar 2013, 19:02

@chris fullmer said:

Yeah, I kind of preferred the old way as well. I think the major improvement is just that you no longer need Google Earth installed to make it work.

Something you get, something you loose. Good thing is that 'Add Location' window can be stretched...

Aureus · 8 Mar 2013, 19:03

@solo said:

Ah, thanks guys I'll give it a go.

One problem is the road names show up.

In my case, they disappear once the view is grabbed.

solo · 8 Mar 2013, 19:04

You are right, I edited my post

solo · 8 Mar 2013, 19:12

Every image gets a watermak so the whole terrain gets coved in Google watermarks.

pilou · 8 Mar 2013, 20:35

Some advices by DareDevil in French but...
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=41070&p=363944

Aureus · 8 Mar 2013, 23:03

@solo said:

Every image gets a watermak so the whole terrain gets coved in Google watermarks.

Not only that but you also end up with a silly outline. If you need to crop it so that you get a normal rectangular outline you can try with exploding images and drawing a rectangle over their flat surfaces. Then you have to delete unwanted area. Or if you deal with 3-d images you need to employ intersecting method with an adequate cube.

I'm afraid watermarks are unavoidable in any case. That's Google Earth's policy: on every image you download you get some stuff so that everybody knows it's from Google Earth.

Obviously, this can be edited in some editing software outside Sketchup.

dale · 9 Mar 2013, 00:31

There is some other satellite imagery out there, and depending on where you are sometimes it's better than Google Earth. Maybe give Flash Earth a try. http://www.flashearth.com/ I don't remember them watermarking either.

Chris Fullmer · 9 Mar 2013, 00:44

There are plenty of sites that offer non-watermarked imagery and topo. You just have to learn how to navigate their websites and specify what area you need - not always very easy to do! Its not terribly expensive, but you might need someone with GIS experience to help you put it into a 3d model?

mitcorb · 9 Mar 2013, 00:48

I input the location you gave into GE. It was interesting to note that a street address label appears a couple of hundred feet west of the apparent location, right at the edge of a grove. Did you see that, or do I need to adjust something? Also, the resolution of that area seems less than you may desire.
What about USGS data?

solo · 9 Mar 2013, 00:56

I have the terrain, I got the USGA info and used civil3D to generate the terrain as needed but do not have a good aerial photo to overlay, however I found Bing maps a better quality and will stitch a map from them....tsk,tsk Google! Bing has better maps.

mitcorb · 9 Mar 2013, 02:26

Yeah, but you can't measure anything- even for approximations- or I haven't found a way.

wind-borne · 9 Mar 2013, 03:22

If you want to stitch together some ~4000x3000 images from 2007 pm me with email address and area you want and I'll send via a Transfer Big Files link.

jpeg's about 3-4 MB
png's about 15-20 MB
tiff's wanna be about 38MB but my connection times out before finishing

A couple reduced images
Those property lines are deletable and a dimensioned line can be added to images to resize in SU if needed.