Not sure if this should've been in the corner bar or not? Does anybody know of any MacBook Pro silicone skins that have sketchup shortcuts, like this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Photoshop-Shortcuts-Silicone-Keyboard-Protection/dp/B004YKRN4I

All I can find is this:

http://www.amazon.com/SKETCHUP-KEYBOARD-STICKER-DESKTOP-NOTEBOOK/dp/B003SBVWDM

Some good suggestions, thank you all very much. I will try following up to see what works best in my situation, although I feel I will end up with a laser level and quite a few batens hammered into the ground to pick up levels from.

I'm in East Anglia, UK. Also, it is right next to the mainline railway between London to Birminghamm

Just to clarify, it's not for a professional application, its for home use. I'm building my own house and the land is far from flat and needs some excavating. I want to get a reasonable appraisal of the topology as a starting point as this will affect the design of the house somewhat. removing earth is not without significant time and cost, so I can play tunes with the design to have minimal groundworks. I also want to consider the neighbours, who would be slightly downhill from the site. So I might have to sink the house down to not make it overbearing on them.

Does anybody have any knowledge of either low cost or open-source photo survey software, similar to http://www.photomodeler.com/ ?
It would be nice to be able to create some site topology that I cannot get from Google Earth due to tree canopy cover.
I'm not sure of the cost of photomodeler, I presume looking at it that it's fairly costly?

Thanks,

Thanks for the replies, I've had problems logging in, so it's taken me a while to respond. I'm looking to model some terrain with differing levels and then look at options for positioning a house and I want to see the effect it will have on two houses that are at a lower level a way down the plot. I want to design as sympathetically as possible before I submit an outline planning proposal and I really want to minimise the impact on the existing properties with respect to blocking views and light, etc. I guess it doesn't have to be super accurate, but it'd be nice to be within a 300mm or so of the average slope or level. Then I can see maybe how much I might need to consider excavating to lower the plot if there is a considerable benefit to the existing properties vs. the extra cost.

Thanks,

Ben

Obviously terrain can be imported from Google Earth to some extent. I have this issue where the land I am looking at was obviously scanned / photo graphed in the height of summer and so the tree canopies covered most of the area, thus rendering the terrain I can extract from there useless. I was wondering what peoples experiences were of surveying / creating there own terrain and good practice for doing this? Can photo-match be used to do this in some way with sandbox?

Any thoughts / ideas welcomed.

Cheers.

Gees, you guys are helpful! I really do appreciate all of your comments and advice. Credit where credit is due Mr. Sonder, they are really useful videos and some beautiful models and drawings. I'd be printing and framing some of those bad boys to put up on show!
I've used SU to produce some simple schemes in my day job (Mechanical Engineer) which I then export out as an iges for our draughtsmen to import into our CAD system. it works ok, except import exporting from different versions (I have to import as an STL and export as an iges). My point being is that I have used it to a basic level and am starting to understand how/when to apply groups and components and to setup scenes. I guess i'm trying to think ahead and get my structure in place first before I draw anything, so your comments and advice are helping to clear things up in this respect.

Thanks very much for letting have a look at how you work, i'll gladly take you up on your offer. I appreciate the help

Firstly, thanks very much for the information Brian, it's certainly very useful. Those Nick Sonder video's are really very good and he's produced them very well. He should consider doing a series, he could even charge a little bit for them, i'm sure there would be plenty of people who would be interested.

In answer to your question, i'm a an Aerospace/Mechanical Engineer by trade, but looking to design and build my own home on a plot I have. My intention is to do a lot of the design work to get to know my plot and understand the comprimises that I might have to make a long the way, based on practicality, cost, etc. Ultimately i'd like to pass something on to an architect as a package and have them take my design and assess it, make any alterations for regulations or code, plus change anything that might not be suitable.

I will send you a PM as you've kindly offered, as this is something i'd like to look into. I've currewntly got the free version of Sketchup, but am keen to upgrade to the full version to give me 2D capability, but would like to evolve a basic concept design first. This kind of takes me to my original question as to if any house model exists, like a Sonders model that is available to see and play around with the model setup?