PlaceMaker

ithil · 11 Nov 2016, 19:18

Oh, it's a good magic!
It's really cool!!

Whaat · 12 Nov 2016, 04:00

@jql said:

Only question I have is about building's textures.

Will it be possible or easy to import them?

I have some ideas on this but it's too early to say anything for sure. Building texture data does not exist in any publicly accessible database that I am aware of.

Here is another video with some more info from Daniel Tal:

JQL · 12 Nov 2016, 11:39

@whaat said:

I have some ideas on this but it's too early to say anything for sure. Building texture data does not exist in any publicly accessible database that I am aware of.

I understand this...

I was working on a project for berlin and they do have it:

404 Page not found

{$page.meta.description}

(www.businesslocationcenter.de)

So, I got a couple of questions for you to consider (even if not for alpha, beta or even release, but for some future versions maybe, after the foundations are layed up):

If we get access to textures info or other more refined info, will we be able to integrate it in some automatic way in the future, or will it only be a matter of replacing stuff manually.

Either way is good anyway... I guess.

Now for the really useful question:

The other question is about photo textures Sketchup plugin. It uses Street view textures to project textures on blocks. It's a relativelly fast way of texturing blockouts but it's not streamlined for bulk operations.

You are syncing streetview with your own view of the city in sketchup.

Could that be used to somehow "paint the city in view", using some kind of projected textures?

I'm thinking on photo textures, mixed with photomatch, with your synced views place. Maybe, at any given time, a snapshot of streetview would be taken, photomatched with the current city position, and the texture would be projected on selected buildings.

It would be incredible if we could also hand remodel part of those buildings while on streetview sync.

Maybe, while in sync, we could also place some props like lightsigns, public seating and other details that we might find useful.

So I'm thinking of a streetview sync edit mode for sketchup...

Thea for sketchup has a render mode which is overlayed with sketchup, which is an excellent tool which allows to work while a render is in progress and the render is displayed in the viewport.

This, of course, is heavy on CPU and slow but I imagine that doing this with Street view would be unvaluable and potentially faster as we are talking of static spherical images.

It would be a very cool design feature for our building designs...

pilou · 12 Nov 2016, 13:02

This plugin will be free? Not free ? with free limited options...

JQL · 12 Nov 2016, 15:42

I imagine it would be a bit silly to make it free, but then again I love silly things!

Pixero · 12 Nov 2016, 17:24

@pilou said:

This plugin will be free? Not free ? with free limited options...

I'm sure it will be extra expensive for users with a colorful avatar...

Whaat · 15 Nov 2016, 14:47

@pilou said:

This plugin will be free? Not free ? with free limited options...

Hi Pilou,
Sorry. Right now, I don't expect there will be a free version.

pilou · 15 Nov 2016, 16:10

If you need a French version...i am free!

boofredlay · 28 Nov 2016, 15:28

Amazing plugin. Looking forward to using this for work. In the pas couple months I have modeled 2 existing sites that this would have been in valuable for.

Will topographic information be imported as well?

Whaat · 4 Feb 2017, 05:55

PlaceMaker is now available at http://suplacemaker.com !

juju · 6 Feb 2017, 13:39

Excellent news!!! I must have missed the e-mail sent to the people subscribed to your website for notifications in this...

+++EDIT+++

I read the section about the imagery tile map quota and understand that, however how large (or small) are these tiles being referred to?

Whaat · 6 Feb 2017, 14:51

@juju said:

Excellent news!!! I must have missed the e-mail sent to the people subscribed to your website for notifications in this...

+++EDIT+++

I read the section about the imagery tile map quota and understand that, however how large (or small) are these tiles being referred to?

Hi juju,

We haven't done the big announcement yet - we wanted to quietly roll in out over the weekend to ensure there were no issues before we do the email blast.

Good question about the tile size - we will need to add that to the FAQ.

At the maximum resolution setting, you should be able to cover 1.5 square miles with less than 50 tiles. However, the tile size is 2x larger with each change in zoom level. Therefore, just by lowering the zoom level to 'high' instead of 'max', you can reduce the number of tiles you need by a factor of 4.

juju · 7 Feb 2017, 07:14

Thanks for the feedback Whaat, it's good to know how to set up extensions efficiently.

The extension seems wonderful and I am trialling ATM, however it seems that there is too little information (in my part of the world) to make it really useful to me, such a pity as I was really looking forward to this.

The special introductory price (-20%) is quite an incentive, but at the asking price this will have to fire on all cylinders for me, just having the road (and in some areas also trees) info is not enough. Probably not the fault of the extension, more that of the data / services it accesses to deliver its product.

Whaat · 7 Feb 2017, 14:17

@juju said:

The extension seems wonderful and I am trialling ATM, however it seems that there is too little information (in my part of the world) to make it really useful to me, such a pity as I was really looking forward to this.

The special introductory price (-20%) is quite an incentive, but at the asking price this will have to fire on all cylinders for me, just having the road (and in some areas also trees) info is not enough. Probably not the fault of the extension, more that of the data / services it accesses to deliver its product.

Sorry to hear that, but I understand. The building data is growing exponentially but is lagging in some areas.

juju · 25 Jul 2017, 13:36

@Whaat

When did the licensing to Placemaker change to an annual subscription model?

Whaat · 25 Jul 2017, 14:37

@juju said:

@Whaat

When did the licensing to Placemaker change to an annual subscription model?

I think the switch was near the beginning of May

juju · 28 May 2018, 09:31

@mrsailboat83 said:

I contacted the company 2 days ago but have had NO RESPONSE.

I suggest you consider that there was a weekend in between. Whaat is normally quite good at resolving matters.

baz · 28 May 2018, 09:39

@mrsailboat83 said:

so far this plugin is a waste of money...
I bought the educational licence and the overlay they provide cannot and does not scale to the maps they provide.
basically, the buildings and roads are out of scale with the maps which makes this overly expensive app useless. I contacted the company 2 days ago but have had NO RESPONSE. I would avoid this app, it's useless and unattended to. Next step is getting blender and doing this in a way that actually works.
Give me my money back

i suggest you chill brandon. whatt will get back to you. be nice.

although in hindsight, rereading your post, this is a forum where people try to help each other, so I now suggest you go blender yourself. xx

Whaat · 28 May 2018, 14:32

@mrsailboat83 said:

so far this plugin is a waste of money...
I bought the educational licence and the overlay they provide cannot and does not scale to the maps they provide.
basically, the buildings and roads are out of scale with the maps which makes this overly expensive app useless. I contacted the company 2 days ago but have had NO RESPONSE. I would avoid this app, it's useless and unattended to. Next step is getting blender and doing this in a way that actually works.
Give me my money back

Hi Brandon,
Your first contact with us about this issue was Saturday morning at 3am local time. Over the weekend, you continued to send us repeated emails.

We are typically praised by our customers for our quick response time compared to many large companies. We are a very small firm and do not have an army of out-sourced support personnel overseas covering our support requests over the weekend. Instead, when you send us a request, you will get a response from either myself or Brian (who did 90% of the programming for PlaceMaker). We normally respond to support requests within 24 hours but we don't work weekends and we ask that you respect that.

As soon as I arrived to work this Monday morning, I responded to your support request. The issue that you are having is not typical and I am confident that we will be able to resolve this issue for you.

Let's continue this conversation through our customer support channel. Thanks!

mrsailboat83 · 28 May 2018, 22:49

seems like a bit of a learning curve but looking forward to getting the most out of it!