How to place model covering large area in Google Earth

3damen

Hello,
does anyone know how to place a large SketchUp model (large in terms of geographical area covered -it's a model of an entire town) in Google Earth? I've tried the 'usual' method - i.e. getting a view that shows a few distinct buildings in the town from Google Earth with the 'Get Current View' command and then aligning these few distinct buildings in my model to those in the Google Earth Snapshot/Terrain.

But when I try to place it in Google Earth, only a tiny bit of the model falls correctly into place - the rest is 'distorted', meaning that the further a building in the model is from the buildings that I aligned to the view, the more it falls out of place in Google Earth. I am guessing that this has something to do with UTM vs. lat/long projection?

The model was originally created in Microstation V8i and in UTM coordinates and if I export directly from Microstation to Google Earth .kmz-files it falls into place beautifully... The reason why I need to convert it to SketchUp is that I want people without expensive CAD-software or a lot of 3D-experience to be able to make changes in the model and then view it in Google Earth...

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

PS. I currently don't have SketchUp Pro, but I am planning to buy it very soon.

Gaieus

Hi 3Damen,

Yes, you are right that the orthogonal projection (used by SU) and the spherical projection (GE) will conflick in a bigger range. The "workaround" could be to model individual buildings (or at least blocks at the maximum).

Have a look at this solution in the 3D Warehouse where a friend of mine uploaded a couple of blocks of my home town. This is a collection though that contains the blocks.

These block are still of some managable size for the difference between the two projections and it is still withing the "tolerable" mistake.

3damen

Thank you - I will try that, although it will probably be necessary to automate the task of placing the individual buildings/blocks, as I have got thousands of buildings in my model...

Gaieus

There MIGHT be another solution in case of such a tremendous amount of data; the "Cities in 3D" program by Google. They accept 3D data "en mass" from local governments, agencies etc. If you follow the big, green "Get started" button at the top left, you get to a page where you can communicate with Google and eventually (I suppose) send in 3D data other than orthogonally set skp/kmz files.