Catwoman!:

Thanks for your reply:

@unknownuser said:

If you don't want to re-invent the wheel, how about hiring someone off this forum to do it for you? You could collaborate with an expert, and wouldn't have to learn the entire program for yourself. Especially if, as you say, you don't possess the native talents that draw people to this kind of software, then your learning curve may be significantly longer than average. I think I've seen on some people's siggies that they are "for hire..."

Umm, it's for a public-service website, and the implication "unpaid/unfunded/shoestring" is completely intended.

@unknownuser said:

There are lots of SketchUp tutorials and videos to help you learn it, if that's the way you want to go. Sounds like an interesting project. Good luck with it!

Yeah, it's a huge amount of material to sort through to find relevant training material, and I haven't been very successful at it so far.

I was kind of hoping to find a group of people somewhere doing similar work.

Thanks,

hen3ry

Folks:

SU 8.0.4810 on MacOS 10.7.1 in the hands of a total newbie with limited drafting-type skills and no artistic talent at all. Preparing material for public-service website.

I need to use SU to model a small village as it was about 80 years ago, based on incomplete historical information: maps and a few photos.

The terrain is very flat. The only important features are a river, some ponds, meadows, cultivated fields, several orchards, and scattered large trees. Generic representations of these will be sufficient. The village is composed of about 100 houses and 20 public buildings, e.g. stores and churches. Representing these with a few simple models, maybe wire frames alone, will be sufficient. Several of the public buildings can be more refined, based on photos, but need not be very detailed.

I have names of who occupied most of the houses, and it is a primary goal to show this information on the model so viewers can see, for example, that extended family "A" occupied 3 houses and ran a store at the central crossroads, and that it is "not far" from that point to the river crossing. I'm guessing there are standard methods for us flag-style label callouts "above". Or, what might work better for the clearest possible labeling of buildings?

Viewers? This is all destined for a relatively low-tech website. That's with respect to implementation -- so far, html and php only-- plus most of the site visitors will likely be technically unsophisticated. So, for example, I'd like to avoid requiring them to download special plug-ins, etc.

I know that I can pick the best camera angles, capture, and export as many PNGs as I want for conventional display on webpages. Is it practical to do more, some kind of interactive walk-through from a web page? I've found the Web Exporter Beta plugin, but it is for PC only -- which I could use if absolutely necessary. It is not clear if the technology is suited for this purpose.

Am I not seeing some big chunk of SU functionality or methodology? Are there applicable tutorials? Anyone know of a similar project?

Feel free to recommend a completely different technology, if there is one better-suited to the goals and constraints above.

TIA