Survey of Geospatial uses in SketchUp

ryangarnett

Hello All,

I am doing a pre scope on how/if the SketchUp community is using geospatial data within SketchUp. Specifically, ortho imagery (aerial photography/satellite images), vector data (ie: shapefiles), spatial databases (ie: PostGIS) and GeoPhotos (ie: digital photos enabled with GPS). I am curious to hear if/how you are using this data, and or, if you would like to use the data, but are unsure of how to use geospatial data within SketchUp.

Any comments or PMs related to you usage would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Ryan

Chris Fullmer

Hi Ryan, this is a topic I'm very interested in. I use GIS data in SU and would love to use more. I use arcGIS to organize my data and then export to SU from there.

What is this pres scope for, and who do you work for?

Chris

ryangarnett

Hi Chris, thank you for your reply, I appreciate you taking the time. I work in two different places, both where I use SU. My primary role is at a small university in Ontario, Canada. I work in a Geography department, where part of my role is working with external clients to assist with services and research. Some of those projects are related to 3D and GIS. Secondly, I consult for a company in the US. A large part of their work is 3D GIS related.

Next year I am starting a university class where I will be teaching how to do 3D modeling and visualization, but specifically related to GIS. I have been working in this industry for close to 10 years, however, I have been working in SU for less than a year. I have been looking at different workflows, plugins and software that can assist with, what seems to me, to be a problem of integrating GIS data into SU. Many users, like myself, have data, often better than what is available on GE, and would like to use it within SU for their own reasons. I have found some good plugins that help with this, but they are expensive, especially when looking at outfitting a university lab. So, I am looking at pitching a development effort at my university to develop a plugin that will help facilitate this need. The pre scope is but one means of research to help identify the need and use by members outside of a university setting. I am hoping to find out about how people use/try to use GIS with SU. I hope to use stories, issues and short comings from the SU community regarding using GIS data with SU, to build my business case with university administration.

Thanks again....Ryan

Sir

have you got a questionnaire or just want to hear our experiences?

Chris Fullmer

Thanks for the info Ryan. Are you using ArcGIS? If so, does it do everything you need, if not, what else would like from it? Is it just the price of purchasing the software? I use it because I have it at work, but I would be very hard pressed to ever consider buying it for personal use due to the price.

Chris

ryangarnett

Originally I was looking for experiences and usage of GIS within SketchUp. But if a questionnaire would be more beneficial, then I will develop one.

ryangarnett

Chris I am using ArcGIS. I have it for work, but like you I would not purchase it for myself. I have been using ESRI products since around 2000. ArcGIS does not handle raster data processing very well at all. I have since moved over to QGIS for may of my processing needs, as well as using the command-line utility FWTools. I find ArcGIS is not developed to be a processing software. They claim there is batch abilities, but they are very cumbersome. Also, ESRI does not connect to PostGIS database very easily, there are 3rd party tools. I am more of an open source minded person.

ryangarnett

I have generated a questionnaire, which can be found at the following location: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/SPMKYLB

Thank you in advance,
Ryan

miikka1978

I have been testing qgis for creating terrains for Sketchup. I have been able to create contours from xyz-file information but so far I haven't found any way to import these contours into Sketchup (including elevation data). I have tried to export the contours as dxf-file, but the elevation data (z values) are not included in dxf-file. Therefore, I would say that I would be interested in different kind of solutions for bringing this data into Sketchup.

Chris Fullmer

can qgis export a point cloud? There are ruby plugins to help turn point clouds into TINs.

ryangarnett

Chris it depends on what you mean about a point cloud. QGIS can save a file that has thousands to millions of points (like LiDAR) but the big part is the file format. Most spatial vector data is stored as a Shapefile or as a database layer, this is something that is not handled by SU. miikka1978 I have had the same issues with QGIS and storing 3D data. I put out a post on a forum a while ago about this ( http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/27937/features-to-3d-from-2d-in-qgis ), but I have never been about this make it work successfully. I have had to result to using ArcGIS, but when I import my contours as DWG, they are scaled wrong, by a factor of 3.28, which is the conversion from feet to meters.

Chris Fullmer

Wrong scale is an irritation yes, but it shouldn't be a roadblock. Just rescale the things.

qgis can't export a the database as a series of text xyz coordinates?

12.1,221.22, 0.112
31.321,123.12,312.23

something like that? If you have that, its fairly easy to get it into SketchUp.

I'm not familiar with qgis. Sounds neat to have open source gis, but it also sounds like it needs to beef up its exporter capabilities so it can work with other software?

ryangarnett

Hi Chris,

Yes I have rescaled it, pain, but not a show stopper. QGIS can export to an xyz file. I have to say that QGIS is beefy and there are many many many different output formats. QGIS has a great development community, and an excellent user forum (like this one). There is very little I cannot do in QGIS that I can do in ArcGIS. Its worth a try, and if you need some assistance along the way, let me now.

Chris Fullmer

I'm just trying to help miikka on this one. They said they couldn't get contours out of it, so I suggested exporting to a xyz pointcloud text file. SU has plugins that can handle that I think.

miikka1978

Thanks for your comments/suggestions Ryan and Chris!

The original terrain information that I have is actually xyz-file. Anyway, it includes over 700 000 points. After cropping the area into required 3000m x 3000m area I still have over 90 000 points. Therefore, I used qgis to create contours from xyz-file. I decided to export the contours including the height label as tif-file and now am tracing the contours in Sketchup. If I remember correct, there was some statement that Sketchup can handle max 5000 - 8000 points. One solution could be to reduce the number on xyz-point in the file, but I haven't found any efficient way for deleting the points in Excel or some other software.

ryangarnett

miikka what format do you have the xyz file in in QGIS. If you convert it to a point shapefile you can use some of the random sampling tools in QGIS. Within the Vector tab, under Research Tools you can use the random sampling tool, which will allow you to select based on a number of features, or by percent of features. You could use this two ways:

to select features to export to a new file
to select features to delete from the current file

GISdude

Ryan/Chris,
I'm still getting my feet wet in SU. I'm trying to create contours in SU, either by bezier curves or splines or something. I still can't figure out how to populate the z-values. This is SF Bay (hunter's point), and I've been to the site before and I can "ground proof" the elevation. Seems to me that this should be very simple because you can toggle the terrain - so it seemed to me that their is underlying planimetric data that comes with the program.

Pardon me for my terms, but I'm an ARCGIS/AutoCAD guy and the 3D world is still kinda new to me.

Thanks for any help,

miikka1978

Thanks for the instructions Ryan.

I managed to save the xyz-file as shapefile in QGIS and reduce the number of points. Also, I finally managed to import the file into Sketchup and create the terrain with Point Cloud Plugin.

One question, is there a way in QGIS to choose points regularly before deleting them. Now I have been using Research Tools / Random selection, which produced ok results. But, it would be even better to be able to remove points regularly/evenly.

ryangarnett

Hi GISDude,
The best way I have found to make contours for SU using geospatial data or info is to make DWG files as contours. This has been a multi step process for me. In some cases I have made contours from a DEM. In other cases I have had contours and needed to modify them. In all cases I have had to convert the contours to 3D z-enabled lines, using the elevation value stored in the attribute table. With this file I exported the contours to DWG. When I import the DWG into SU the contours have Z values. I have had to scale the terrain by a value of 3.28 (SU seems to have a conversion issue from feet to metres with DWG). I hope this helps.

ryangarnett

Hi Miikka,

There isn't a defined way, but there are some work arounds. Would you want to select the points by count (ie: every 5th value in the table), or by distance? Also, are the points in a regular grid; spaced every 10 metres (for example).

Ryan