New user in need of some advice designing freestyle ski park

jleighton88

I am new to sketchup and am in need of some help. I have one specific goal for using sketchup. I want to make a base template of the ski resort i work at. I want to basically have an accurate blank run for me to use to design the freestyle park that i build. I envision being able to select the features that i have already created on sketchup and import them to the empty ski run. dimensional accuracy is a must for me. I have gave this a go already, I imported the ski resort from google earth to sketchup and toggled terrain feature. I then did my best to outline the runs that I want to use as the template. Hopefully someone on here with some experience here can point me in the right direction. Thank you in advance for any and all help.

pilou

You can make the inverse

Import the Google earth terrain in Lumion, then export your SU models (dae) in this terrain

mptak

Depending on the location of the resort you might have access to better topographic information than is available in Google Earth (though some of that can be really spot on I think). County GIS's or even the developer may have more dense terrain information and if accuracy and dimension is important it might be worth the extra legwork on the front end. Once you get the info there are a variety of plugins or scripts to get the information into sketchup. Though sometimes problematic Sketchy Physics is also worth a look as you proceed.

I would guess that you may also want to cut cross-sections of the run, this can be done by using the section tool and creating a slice from each cross-section. Hope this helps a bit.

dale

I agree with mptak, I'm sure that the resort must have accurate survey information. You should approach them, and see if the surveyors could give you digital copies. It sounds like it would be to their benefit.
Good luck

jleighton88

thanks for the help. i was able to get a very detailed map of the resort. i am having issues trying to import it to sketchup. the map is a KMZ file. how do i import this image to sketchup?

Gaieus

It depends on the nature of the geometrical data in the kmz file. Note that a kmz file is actually a renamed zip file so if you change the extension, you can see what it is. It can be two things:

A kmz file containing (in a subfolder) a collada file (dae extension). In this case, you should be able to import it into SketchUp from File > Import > 3D (and select the proper file type).
The geometry is described in a top level kml file - in which case you can try this plugin.