Its a little hard to work with the small thubnails but the bottom two phots pretty clearly have misplaced vertical vanishing point. The top right is a big tricker to tell, with the camera plane seemingly in line with the top of the box, very small movement in the left or right vanishing point will swing the magenta line form vertical vanishing left or right. In three of the photos I've added new yellow vanishing point triangle, and new magenta lines perpendicular to the horizons. I've added while ring where the magenta lines cross.

efeme75 I have not done anything this this in a while, although there are more photogrammetry and LIDAR based options out now that may be more automated that PhotoMatch. With the approach from this thread, the orientation of the photo relative to the horizon doesn't matter, but it does require an orthogonal object in the scene large enough to find vanishing points, and create perpendicular lines as shown in Alan's example.

@jim said:

Hi David,

I put it up on GitHub.

Thanks!! I'll check it out this weekend.

David

Jim, what is the licencing like on ruby-dxf-reader? In particular I'm wondering if it could be included in the code base for an open source project http://openstudio.nrel.gov/ or if it could be used in a measure (our equivalent of a plugin) on the Building Component Library https://bcl.nrel.gov/. We already support gbXML as an import option, but I'd like to support DXF as well so almost any modeling tool can be used as a starting point.

David

I use to do something similar, having many external components, but I did not use an external rendering application. For trees I had simple trees (just a stick) and the real trees. In the master file I setup my scenes and did almost everything with the stick trrees. Then I swapped them for e real trees just before rendering. Using proxies with third party rendering sounds good.

You could take a similar approach to what I did with simple and detailed buildings and simple and detailed terrain. Then have a ruby bath swap them?

David

Just in case anyone is interested, I posted an update to the OpenStudio energy modeling thread. Our July release had two big milestones. We crossed over to 1.0 from our 0.x release, and we added life cycle cost analysis, so energy conservation measures can be looked at along side capital costs and ongoing utility and O&M costs.

Here is a link to the post in the plugin forum
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=51586&p=484538#p484538

David

Another three months, another version of OpenStudio. This is an important one. We lost the 0 at the front and moved to 1.0. The key feature for this version is the ability to add life cycle costs to model and to measures in the Parametric Analysis Tool.

This is one of 4 videos in a playlist for new features of the 1.0 release. It shows how life cycle costs and utility rates are added to a baseline model and then to design alternatives using energy conservation measures.

Let me know if you have any questions. Next step, cloud based simulation and model calibration.

David

Move the top angle in the board one tread width to the left and it should match the angle of the stair

I had a workshop today, and then I'm the session organizer on a. Session on Friday.

You could always import it as a background watermark and try to manually match a camera view to it. Not sure if the perspective would work for match photo scene.

Illustrator has a indirect selection tool in addition to a selection tool. The indirect selection is the hollow arrow. It allows you to make a selection via fence or window into nested objects. A common use for this would be to take a multistory building made of many seperate groups, draw a window to stretch out the building 10 feet.

I'll be at AiIA all week. Just wanted to start a thread about possible get together. I'm pretty busy so I can't commit to any specific time but if there is a get together I'll try to make it. Didn't know who else will be in town for it.

David

If you export to dxf you can view in AutoDesk FormIt.
http://autodeskformit.com/getting-started-with-formit/

Thanks, that is perfect. Our plugin's installer doesn't look for SU 2013 so users not wanting to use our beading edge developer release can't easily use 2013 (without hand moving files). Having the SU 8 link is good solution.

Yesterday, this link went to SketchUp 8 downloads, but today it is forwarding to the main SketchUp download page. Is anyone else aware of an active SkechUp 8 download link?
http://www.sketchup.com/intl/en/download/index.html

Interesting discussion. I work on OpenStudio which is a C++ SDK that includes a SketchUp plugin that uses ruby. We use tool called SWIG http://www.swig.org that gives us bindings to Ruby, Python, C# and potentially many other languages. Ruby is our most supported binding, but users are starting to use other bindings as well.

David

@chris fullmer said:

Wow that is great news Tina! Congratulations and thanks for sharing!

Chris

PS I'm not sure who will be there, but I'm sure there will be a few members of the SU team at the Denver AIA.

Congratulations Tina. I'll be at AiA Denver as well. Was thinking of post for that, see who wants to hang out for beer. I'm doing full day workshop on Wednesday, but will be around rest of the convention as well, not sure about Saturday.

Adobe Illustrator shod be able to vectorize the image and save it to a dxf that you can bringinto SketchUp.

You could just keep it coincident with the left as well. In Alan's drawing he might have just been trying to maintain the same aspect ratio as his starting photo.The main goal is to re-center the image. You can't really tell how much of the original photo was cropped, just that it was cropped in a way that moved the center. This technique just expands one or two of the for sides to re-create the original center point.

If you took a good photo and cropped x" off both the left and the right, and then y" off the top and bottom MatchPhoto would work fine. The real problems are introduced when you crop X" from the left and Y" from the right.

Sorry I missed the 2011 activity here. It is a shame that in 2013 I still can't have auto-calibrated photo match scenes that work with any photo

Alan, your drawing describes the technique much more clearly.

David