Newbie

[bmeg]

Hello, I'm Brian, new to the forum and also new to google sketchup.
I'm a chartered surveyor and business owner who specialises in building surveying, measured building surveys and topographical surveys.I'm experienced with other cad applications, Acad, Lss (Land survey software)and various photomodelling software, to name a few.

My initial area of interest with sketchup is how to use field surveyed data, imported into
sketchup as 3d polylines, to produce 3d building and land survey(topographical) models. My interest in using google
sketchup was initiated through discussions with several client's (architect's) who are users and would like their survey drawings delivered in 3d rather than traditional 2d cad drawings which require additional work in sketchup.

Most existing examples of using sketchup for building modelling appear to be based on square buildings with planar surfaces where plans can be extruded vertically etc. to produce a model. This is very rarely the case with existing buildings, so it will be interesting to see how techinques develop to deal with this .eg. Planarity of faces should not be assumed with measured building surveys, as they very rarely are. Surveys also have to acheive stringent accuracy tolerances tyically +/- 5 to 15mm of true values.

Whils't a relatively inexperienced user of sketchup, as a professionally qualified and experienced surveyor I would be happy to advise members in areas which fall into my expertise. I would also be very interested to hear from other members who have used google sketchup to produce accurate models of topographical and measured building surveys, together with users who have used 3d point clouds within ggole sketchup.

So, Hello to all and I look forward to a steep learning curve and discussing all things sketchup.

Regards

Brian

[Gaieus]

Hi Brian and welcome!

First of all, here is a plugin which could be useful for you when importing measured points as a point cloud (and then creating terrain meshes from them):
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=29126

As for building footprints and their 3D representation: you need not confine yourself to rectangular things in SU (although presumably most of the walls are at least vertical - or meant to be vertical). I would still use a different approach when modelling buildings. They are rather hard to be modelled from (inaccurate) measurements. By inaccuracy I do not necessarily mean that you measure it inaccurately (although differences somewhere between 5 and 15 mms will definitely cause you a head ache) but inaccuracy in existing buildings. When there is a couple of mm difference, one should probably try to "cheat" a bit in order to get a coplanar wall instead of trying to get faces between non-coplanar edges.

[bmeg]

Gaieus,

Thank you for your reply and advise. A few mm either way shouldn't be a problem if this makes thing easier to model.

Brian