Thank you Gaieus! That is exactly what I need.

Aerilius. You are mistaken as you can download any building in google earth that google created...except those created via this new technique. Simply to to a building you want and when it highlights click on it... it then gives you a preview of that building in the right side of the popup window. Just click on that picture and it gives you options on how to download it. I have been doing this for several years now.. I hope the google police dont come after me

I agree John The current state of buildings in google earth is terrible. They only look good when you are looking at it 10,000 feet in the air and when you get close it look like they are crumbling. This tech should only be released when its further along. Aerillius.. I did see that 3d warehouse still has the use created buildings but they dont have 80% of the other buildings that were generated by google. You had to get those straight from google earth. I am hearing from my friend though that if you have google earth pro and turn off terrain the original google models are there and the blobs are gone. I guess its time to fork over another $400 for the pro version.

I was just on the Google Earth looking at a future project and it looks like they have removed all of models from the site that we were once able to download. Now as i see it,the building are an extruded blob! This is terrible news if you have ever used their models for surrounding context.

I agree that better managing of large models is a must! The addition of better animation capabilites would also be welcome. I dont care much about the rendering as that already works for me with Vray and Maxwell render but I do think they need to work on the ability to model more complex shapes.

As for Free and Pro, I dont really care about the free version... Let that stay as it is as you get what you pay for And if they had significant improvements i would not mind paying even more for the Pro version.

I love using sketchup as a modeling tool but i feel its starting to become stagnant when it comes to improvements. The plugnins that users are creating are amazing but is google relaying on their merits for help in keeping the program up to date?. My worry is that since google bought the program to bring in models into Google Earth, they dont have urgency to improve it as it seems to work well for that particular goal.. I am hoping I am wrong but the last several news letters show very little on what has, or will be improved upon.

Im interested to hear what others think.

Thank you

Thanks Thomthom for the excellent advice. Very helpful!

Hello All. Sorry for the delay in getting back but once i got the workaround i had to crank on another project.

Usually I dont have a problem exporting but for project i used the new feature where you can photo texture directly from street view. This saved me tons of time compared to actually going to the site, taking photos, croping, saving and importing. Its this new feature i think giving me the problem. For those of you who have not used it, this is a description from google how it works.;

"Once your model is geolocated, use Photo Textures to find and apply photographic textures from Street View to walls in your model.
Select a wall in your model to texture.
Find a photo that shows that entire wall.
'Select Region' and adjust pins.
'Grab' to apply the selected region.
Repeat until you're done."

I may have found a work around.

1. Explode everything in the scene.
2. Export as a KMZ file
3. Re-import into sketchup
4. Now export as a 3dS or fbx, or Ojb file.

Seems to work for me?

Sure, attached is a basic sketchup file with just one building. Are you able to export this as a 3ds, fbx, or obj file with textures? It never works for me.

Thanks for looking!

test building.skp