Hey guys! It's John with ideaform3D. And
today I'm going to show you how you can use Google Earth and RealityCapture to
capture a 3D model of a place that you really like and 3D print it. So if you visit google.com/Earth you can download Google Earth for free right
at the top I'm going to hit Earth versions and the one we want for this
project is at the very bottom. It's download Earth Pro on desktop. So once you have Google Earth installed we'll launch it and the first step if we click
on View we want to hide the toolbar and the sidebar. We want to hide as many user interface elements as possible so we're left with a nice image for the
photogrammetry software. So the next step I'll go to Tools, Options and I want to
under texture colors I want to turn off compress, I want to turn my anisotropic
filtering to high and I want to change my anti-aliasing to high. And then I'm
going to hit apply. This is going to make sure that I get the cleanest, highest res
textures and image which our photogrammetry software will deal with a
lot better when creating the 3D model. Okay so I'm going to restart the
application to make sure those settings took effect and let's find a spot that
we want to create a 3D model of. So let's zoom in to my hometown Reno so here's Lake Tahoe in California and Nevada and just north of Lake Tahoe is Reno so I'm
going to zoom in to an area that I like to hike at we'll just zoom in to a cool
little hill over here. So this is a pretty cool little spot there's a cool hill that we can fly around and survey for our photogrammetry software. So now
you want to be screen capturing your navigation inside
of Google Earth and so a great program for this is OBS open broadcaster
software it's free and it allows you to capture what you see on your screen.
So we'll load up OBS and right now I'm just capturing my screen, I'm going to
hide my logo and my toolbar and the important thing in your screen capture
software is you want to go to the video settings, so if I hit settings I want to
just make sure that my output is as high resolution as it can go so right now
it's at 1080p that should be good and the next thing I want to make sure that
my video bitrate is fairly high like a minimum of 40,000 kbps which is 40
megabits per second. So this looks good, we're ready to go with our capture
software. Ok so I just started capturing our screen and we're ready to start
capturing our images. So I want to capture this mountain right here I want
to be a good distance away so I can fly around in circles almost the way I think
of it is almost like a helicopter surveying an area. So the first pass I'm
gonna be a little more low angle maybe zoom in one more click and I want to
move this hand to the very bottom of the screen and just middle mouse click and
drag and then pan and the same thing over and over.
I just wanna in a circular motion fly around this hill almost as if I'm a
helicopter surveying it in a circle. So it's a little tricky trying to get the
trying to fly around it in a circle but after you do a couple clicks you get
kind of used to it. So after I've made almost a full loop
around this mountain, the next step I wanna, I don't want to zoom it all
cuz that can mess with the photogrammetry, I just want a middle
mouse click and come down on it from a higher angle. And then do the same thing
from this higher angle I want to fly around it kind of like a helicopter in a
loop. So we're just kind of surveying the land. And we're almost done here and I
want to just keep my clicking at the very bottom so that doesn't confuse the
photogrammetry software. And there we go we've done our two loops now I'm just gonna go back to my capture software and I'm gonna stop it. Alright so we just
finished capturing us flying around and surveying this hill in Google Earth.
Almost like we're a helicopter. The next step is using a video editor I find
After-Effects to be the most useful because we can import the footage and we can control the framerate which will be an important part of this process. So now
that I have my clip imported into After Effects I'm gonna find my in and out
points so I just want to find the start of where we started surveying the hill.
So it looks like it happened about right there, I'm gonna hit CTRL + SHIFT + D, which will split the clip and I'm gonna get rid of the beginning. And just slide this
over at the very beginning. So, now I want to find the end and just trim the end
off, so same thing I'm gonna find the spot where we finished flying around our
hill. And it looks like it happened about right there. So I'm gonna trim that and that will be our out point and now here's the
important tricky part. We have this region of us flying around and surveying
this hill. Oh one more step I'm gonna zoom out and I'm just gonna scale this
video clip up, until I get rid of the Google Earth logo and the toolbars. So, now we're kind of just left with what almost looks
like a video of us flying around this hill. We still kind of see the cursor but
I found that the photogrammetry software it doesn't get too hung up on it. Another
thing if we zoom in it looks a little blurry so I'm gonna right click and I'm
going to apply a sharpen and I'm just gonna crank this up until it looks like
it's getting a little sharpness, so that looks good about 25. And the last step which is the most important part, I'm gonna right click on my composition and
hit composition settings right now. My framerate is 30 frames per second so
that is about 2000 frames that we have of us flying around. So the trick here is
I'm gonna go back into composition settings and I'm gonna make my frame
rate 2 and what that does is it drops the frame count from around 2000 to a
much more reasonable number about 150. So that'll be perfect and then I'm gonna
hit CTRL + M to render those 150 frames. I'm gonna change this to a JPEG sequence and I'm going to save this in a folder called 3D scan on my desktop. Hit save. I'm going to hit render and since we change the frame rate to 2 frames per
second, 2 fps, now it's rendering a 150 frames from the
recording that we did and this is the data that we're gonna put into RealityCapture to create our 3D model. Alright guys, so here's my folder with all of our images that we rendered all 150 frames of us flying around in Google Earth. So
it's pretty cool you can step through it and it kind of just looks like a
helicopter flying around. So next step I'm gonna start up the photogrammetry software I'm using and this software is called
RealityCapture and this is the software that can convert a bunch of images into
a 3D model. So this is really cool software. So I'm gonna jump back to our
folder with all our images, I'm gonna hit CTRL + A to select them all and I'm just
gonna drag them into this project. And the next step I'm going to hit the
alignment tab and I'm just gonna hit align images. Okay guys RealityCapture just finished aligning all of our images from After
Effects and as you can see here it did something really cool. It found out where
all of those camera positions are in 3D space and it created what's called a
point cloud, which is kind of like a really rough representation of our 3D
scene. So the next thing I'm gonna zoom out and using these colorful handles I'm
going to crop in on just the section that I want to create a 3D model. Alright
once I'm happy with my crop I'm going to go into Reconstruction and I'm going to
hit Normal Detail. And what this is gonna do now is this is gonna take all of our cameras and the point cloud information and convert it into an actual 3D model
that we can 3D print. Alright guys so RealityCapture just finished creating the high detail 3D model and it looks beautiful. RealityCapture did a great
job at just capturing really subtle details and the rock formations and I'm
just really happy with the result. It looks so good I can't wait to 3D print
this. So I'm gonna get it into meshmixer and clean it up really quick and then
send it to my 3D printer. Alright guys so I did a little more cleanup. Cleaned up some of the trees and finished it by doing edit Make Solid which takes your
mesh and just turns it into a nice clean watertight mesh for your 3D printer. So
I'm really happy with how this turned out and let's go ahead and send it to
the 3D printer. Alright guys here's the 3D print and it turned out really good. I printed this on an Anycubic Photon at a layer height of 0.05 millimeters and it
did a great job of capturing all the fine details from the 3D model we
created. So overall this has been a really fun project, it's really cool to
have a 3D print of an area that's unique to me and a place that I've experienced.
So I think this has been a lot of fun and it's a very unique way of being able
to use Google Earth and RealityCapture to create a 3D model of an area that you
know. So if you guys liked this video and you enjoyed this tutorial leave a like
and subscribe to my channel and I'll leave links to all the software in the
comments below. Thanks again for watching and have a
good day guys. Bye
