Photo match challenge

danbig

Hi All -

Here's a challenge that, frankly, I don't know if even the great minds who browse these forums can tackle. (Ok, I just said that to lure the great minds to try )

I've tried this several times, with limited or no success:

Go to Bing maps (I know, I know, Microsoft blah blah), and navigate to an area that has buildings and roads. Set the view to "Bird's Eye", and take a screenshot.
Attempt to perform a Photomatch in sketchup, using the screenshot from Bing maps.
Place a 3d element into the matched photo in sketchup, and get it to look even remotely natural.

Here are my thoughts on why this is so challenging:

The perspective has been removed from the Bing bird's eye imagery, and so it's hard to set the vanishing points correctly using photomatch.

Even thought the bird's eye images aren't a top-down map view, they are still close to top-down.

I know that Building Maker from Google allows the use of similar "bird's eye" imagery to create simple buildings... but that isn't my goal here.

Rob D

For any photo to work with photomatch the image has to be uncropped. This is because PM assumes the centre of the image is the centre of the camera lense. So I can't see any way to use PM with Bing.

thomthom

I've given up on Photomatch for birds eye view images. The lens angle, and the fact that the imagery is cropped - makes it pretty much impossible.

I do it by hand now;

load the imagery as a background watermark
set the AOV to about 6-8 degrees
hide anything other that key features of the model
pan/zoom by hand to get an approximate match.
finish off in post