@nick c said:

you are wrong phacot.

Under the British / USA law and i would imagine all the rest of the countries in the world. You can leave your shop/house unlocked with the door wide open with no one inside. And anyone entering and taking any item and walking out is still classes as stealing. The police will still arrest and charge them.

There is no excuss to say that a Google Site is understaffed. maybe they should sell some of the mapping vehicals i keep seeing on the discovery channel.

Oh, i forgot. They just sold Sketchup, they should have loads of money for more staff.

Under British law, if you stick a sign up in your shop saying "Free items, take whatever you want." and then call the police when you see the shop next door selling your things then the police will tell you that they are committing no crime because you gave them away.

That's what you are doing when you give your models away on the 3DW.

Just be thankful that you're producing models that someone wants to take credit for. Now if only you could put some work into making your sketchucation posts worth reading.

See how easy I "stole" your words there. That's what happens when you put things up on the net for people.

Now you can get mad about it, or you can wet your knickers in rage like you are doing over the kid on the 3DW.

But in all honesty, you're acting like a 12 year old immature kid who is angry because a 5 year year old stole your sweet, even though you don't even like the sweet and was walking away from it.

The best solution is for you to not post anything on the Internet until you've grown up a bit.

You're right Dave R.

There is no point at all in being part of a community that has no law or the ability to police itself. I am happy to go back to the days of the wild west and tar and feather the guy.

If the 3D warehouse was policed half as well as this site, there wouldn't be a problem.

@mitcorb said:

Yeah, I was wondering how Athens, Greece got so detailed in such a short time in Google Earth. I was thinking who in the world was doing this? I remember even Tokyo was populated with 3d bldgs. a couple of years ago. They'd better hurry up in my locale, I am modeling my downtown in my spare time.

Most of the building in Athens will be created by people using Building Maker. There rest will be models made in SU.

Athens will probably be one of the areas that they will use this process on. When that happens all the BM and SU models will be replaced.

Unless your downtown is part of a major area, it's likely that it'll be years before they do this with your town, if ever.

They haven't introduced this yet. They only announced it last week, so they could beat Apple to the punch because Apple is replacing Google for their maps in their next OS release.

Personally I think the reason that they sold SU was the reason that they said they sold SU - that it wasn't a core business and they are better off using their resources on the most important and lucrative projects.

IMO SU is an already perfectly suitable tool for GE models. They don't any more development and they are keeping ties so that SU and the 3DW is used by GE.

While this new development will hopefully provide awesome 3D maps and buildings to see, the fact is that initially it will only be a dozen or so major cities, and will probably only cover the major areas for years to come. For the small towns and cities, user generated models will be the only source for 3D in GE.

A machine that will give the correct answer to every question asked of it.

Create a group or component and make sure it is selected, then you'll be able to create a shortcut.

Just tried uploading a simple, 20 second model and everything went as normal.

I remember my only problems in the past with uploading models were with my virus protection software. SU wasn't authorised to upload to the internet and that was causing the problem.

Rate one of his models, in the feedback ask him questions or ask him to contact you.

@frv said:

1. Skethup was sold since Google now also understands that modeling the whole world is a bad concept. Scanning is the future.

I hope that Apple do offer something exceptional to truly kick Google Earth/Maps butt. The more competition the better.

But I'm a little wary of the fact that Apple's recent releases have been significantly less awesome than the hype created beforehand. Both the iPhone 4S and iPad "3" releases offered very little in terms of improvements. So why automatically assume that just because Apple are dumping Google that they have something awesome to replace it with? The animosity that Apple feel towards Google could spur them to create a GE killer, but it's more likely that they are just dumping Google and going with a close competitor than they're going to make a huge stride forward with their first attempt.

I hope that Apple do offer an awesome service like those flyover movies suggest. I'm not holding my breath though.

Just having a look at your pictures again, I've got a worry that your model will be rejected.

The reason - the roofing textures.

Looking at it you've just used a standard SU texture. It will probably be pretty close to the actual roof, and definitely far more accurate than the GE satellite image, but for some reason they are really clamping down on the roofs recently.

@judgedrey said:

I'm just realizing now that sometimes, using an external editor isn't an option, when I apply a texture sometime, and the texture wraps around something sometimes, then it would be nice to be able to copy/paste a small section of the texture to fix a little part.

In that case you have to make sure that the area you want to edit is a flat surface, then just a rectangle or other shape around what you want to erase. Then right click on that area > Texture > Position. Then you can move the texture around so that you lose the area you don't want and you can get the best fit.

@krisidious said:

thief...

And he's a moderator as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xK5S1C951o Editing Textures with an External Editor

Not exactly what you were asking for, but it is a more elegant solution than the one you describe.

"When does GE update their satelite photos? The ones from my hometown are from 2004!!"

It depends on the area. In the top tool bare of GE there is an icon with a clock an an arrow facing backwards. That's the "Show Historical Imagery" tool. If you click on that you'll be able to see how often the areas you are looking at have been updated.

@andybot said:

@johnsenior1973 said:

@jason_maranto said:

In the long-term Building Maker is a doomed product too -- as it is only a useful item for the near-term goals... but sooner or later manual model creation for GE will be redundant.

Isn't SU a doomed product as well then?

What do you mean? To me SU (plus rubies) is a powerful 3D design tool. It's a powerful competitor in the field of 3D modeling. Building Maker is a different animal altogether - not a design tool at all but a documentation tool. (which may soon be supplanted by better automation methods, as Jason indicates.)

So automated model generation is going to kill Building Maker, but it isn't going to affect SketchUp at all?

SketchUp is an awesome program. It's my favourite program and I love it, but its strength isn't in its power, it is in its speed and simplicity. But in the future if models are going to be easily created automatically, one must question whether some other 3D program won't include these automated methods, and mean that SketchUp is as redundant as Jason thinks BM will be.

@jason_maranto said:

In the long-term Building Maker is a doomed product too -- as it is only a useful item for the near-term goals... but sooner or later manual model creation for GE will be redundant.

Isn't SU a doomed product as well then?

@unknownuser said:

I'm very glad SketchUp was sold -- because Google never really knew what it potentially had.

What is SU's potential? The users of SU rightly love it, but most of the 3D industry gets by pretty well without it.

@unknownuser said:

As far as the warehouse is concerned: I've always seen the strength of 3D as being infinitely re-usable assets... I think the warehouse quality would self-sort if it could be monetized (selling the assets, instead of giving them away), although I'm sure that idea is abhorrent to most users.

The 3DW helps Google populate Google Earth for very little cost.

If the 3DW was monetized, then surely the question would be quickly asked why anyone would model for GE for free when they could sell their models so quickly and easily on the 3DW?

@andybot said:

@johnsenior1973 said:

He clearly has a higher opinion of the 3DW than most of Sketchucation.

I'm not saying the warehouse itself is crap, just a large volume of models in it are. Do you not agree that it takes some sorting before one finds usable models of any particular thing. See this related thread

Andy

I think that there are hundreds of thousands of models that are crap. But I think that it's relatively easy to sift through and quickly find fantastic models that are easily usable.

Personally, I think that there is a snobbishness towards the 3DW that is similar to the snobbishness towards SU. I would instantly ignore anyone who referred to SU as a toy, but I think that SUers who refer to 3DW as a "repository of crap" are just as ignorant.

@jbacus said:

Another good perspective from the CAD industry press. I'm sure Roopinder would appreciate it if you guys read his post and gave him your thoughts on the deal.

john
.

"I had to make a factory layout. Let’s see, should I make each machine in 123D, even if was free and easy to use (supposedly)? Or should I use models from the SketchUp library. I found Bridgeports, lathes, drill presses, tables, even a water jet cutter in the SketchUp library. In less than one hour, I had a reasonable attempt at a factory layout. In fact, every tool and machine I needed was there. How deep was this library? Out of curiosity, I looked for Adirondack chairs. There were dozens of Adirondack chair designs, for God’s sake."

He clearly has a higher opinion of the 3DW than most of Sketchucation.

@unknownuser said:

Google paid the anti to get into the phone business....The phone business has brought the biggest giants to their knees.
I can't imagine giving away Sketchup. I think that Google is floundering internally..there would be no reason to sell other than to shore up a cash-flow blip on the near horizen. I'm not on topic here but it will be interesting to see what happens to the cash...if we hear nothing, it was necessasy to keep their metrics looking strong and keep the stock floating....with emphasis on float!

Google's market capitalization, it's value in other words, is $196 BILLION. Hang on, the share price has just gone up a bit and it's $197 billion now.

Selling Sketchup would be completely insignificant if Google needed cash. It would be like spending an hour to get the nickle in the back of the sofa, and having to damage the sofa to get it.