Creating scaled 3d maps and geography using Sketchup and heightmaps. Made using all free tools.

we're going to learn how to make 3d geography or 3d maps whatever you want to call it using free tools all free tools I'm going to do it in Sketchup make but I believe you could use this process for basically any 3d rendering program so this is what you're going to get as a final product basically you can make it as detailed as you want so I'm going I'm not going to focus on how do you sketch up so much just as the basically the process of how to import 3d terrain and then how to get your colored map on top of it how to project it on top of that so the websites you use our height mapper this is the there's a website right there and you can use Google Earth or whatever whatever map website you want to get the imaging this gave me a nice detailed image of the area I want to get so first of all you want to find the area you want and put on your maps and your labels map lines and labels and then click the export button and save it wherever you want and I'm actually going to save it with this number because we're gonna need this number to get to make it a accurate 3d model so I'm just gonna save that in the file name so I'm going to copy that explore this again paste it in there and put it in here save it so we need that one and we also need to now turn off map lines and labels and do it again export it paste in that number and save it oops we're going to get a change name here no lines you can name it whatever you want save it so we now we have our two images with one of those images we have to reduce the size you will understand why later you can use whatever for whatever imaging program you want to reduce the resolution of your image I'm just going to use because we're doing this with all free software well that's opening we're gonna go back here I'm gonna close this and I'm gonna do a make a new one make a new file here okay so first of all we want to do is change to a top view and a camera put it on to parallel projection if you don't know how to use that do that just would search for YouTube video on how to do it so I think we got open here we'll go back here we're going to open the file that we made that doesn't have the lines on it because that's the one we're gonna reduce in size so it's this one here it's gonna open that I'm actually going to go you go here to image scale image I'm actually going to reduce it down to 15% will understand why later I'll change that to percent try that again 15% scale it there we go so now I'm going to overwrite that PNG okay so I got that I can close gimm now I'm gonna go back here going to import my first image where were we documents so I'm going to first of all I'm going to import the image that has the lines on it because that's the one I want okay imported here we can drag it out to whatever size you want just for simplicity I'm gonna drag it out to a thousand centimeters enter so I got that one I'm gonna right click on this entity info I'm gonna add a layer here and I'm going to call this with lines you can call whatever you want I want to be able to turn this off later so I'll put that on this layer here with lines now I can turn that on and off mmm that's Becky crying in the background by the way and now we're going to import the next image which is we have not imported it yet I'm going to go back here so we need this image here so we're just going to take a screenshot of that of the piece we want which I can't do right now because I'm recording this video so I'm going to stop this take the screenshot and keep recording well I was taking my screenshot a screenshot of the map I realized that I actually needed this scale down here so I went over to Google Maps and I did it in Google Maps so we're gonna see how to do it in Google Maps which everybody wants anyways I'm guessing okay so I got my screenshot of my map so now i'm i think i stunk that went to the desktop yeah that is there so we're gonna import that we can just drag it over make it approximately the same size so this next step is the most important one or very important anyways we have to line up these two images so I'm going to right click on this and in the info and we're gonna put that well actually first we're gonna explode it right click again make group and now we're gonna add a new layer call this projective because we're going to project it onto the map so now I can turn that projected Oh once I put it on the layer now I can turn the projected on and off so now we're gonna right click on this so actually so we're gonna we're gonna bring up the bucket tool and we want to give this some transparency so we can line this up so if I click on my little house here teaching Sketchup here sorry and I go back over here bucket tool command on a Mac and I show control I think on Windows that will select this this image and then I can double click on it here and I can choose what my transparencies should be probably around 30 or something like that like think we should even bring it down a bit more maybe 25 okay once I have that and we're gonna go to the move tool here and I want to line these up so I can see kind of the blue line underneath right now they don't line up this image is actually too big so I'm going to scale this a bit press em to get back to my move tool again try lining this up again still too big you know scale a little bit more this is the most tedious parts of the process I haven't figured out an easier way to do this to get the scale right somebody can you can leave it on post on the comments okay we're almost there and I'm not sure why but they don't seem to I actually have to rotate it a little bit was what I've noticed Dell depends on how accurate you want to be with this but normally you want to be fairly accurate so we're gonna rotate it just a bit try that again gotta rotate it just a bit more okay that's actually fairly good I think it could be rotated yeah just a tiny bit more just do this once more okay that's pretty good so once you have the images lined up you can take more time doing this if you want making the scale more accurate and everything but that all depends on how IQ it wanted to be so you got the images lined up now that's that that parts done so now you can go back to the camera put it back to perspective and now what we want to do is we're going to take our projected image we're going to move it straight up a bit get it out of the way once we have that up there come back here if we want turn the opacity back up to 100 K so that that part is done so now this image we don't really need it any we can turn our projected for now this image we're not actually going to use it we're not going to convert it to 3d we're going to come in here and we're going to import the other image that is much smaller now this one here with no lines we're going to import it to here drag it out so it's exactly the same size we know that it's a thousand across almost exactly a thousand this is resized but I know the bigger file was exactly a thousand so I'm going to turn off with lines and now I have my base I guess I can put this on a layer two if I want call it whatever you want so now I can turn that on and off as well so now this is the part why your and now you only understand why we resize that image so we've got to install this this plugin for Sketchup which is called bitmap to mesh if you search for it in the plug-in warehouse by TomTom excellent plugin wonderful good well done TomTom so you want to click on mesh from height map in this case and now this is the part where you need to know how far to pull it up now that's where the formula comes in handy that they put on the height mapper which is wonderful this number here so that's the X to Z ratio so basically the this measurement here the width which in this case is a thousand all I got to do is multiply it by that number and I will know how far to pull this up so just bring out a calculator and I'm just going to copy if copy in that number as soon as my computer decides to load it so mm-hmm here it is so I'm going to copy that in paste it into my calculator times 1000 and there's my number 114 so I can go write that down 114 points eight seven eight now I come in right-click mesh from heightmap now I actually know how far to pull it up you can see down down on the right hand side I can actually type in a value which is one hundred and fourteen point eight seven eight enter and I'm not sure why I always get an error message at first then I have to type it in again one hundred and fourteen point eight seven eight enter and the second try normally always works now if I had a higher resolution bitmap it would take forever to load and I wouldn't get my 3d energy just lock up the computer so you might actually have to reduce it even more and depending on the your processor speed so now all I have to do is go turn on my projected again coming here click right click and make sure it says projected and then bucket tool for a modifier key select that I can turn this back off once I get out of the group turn that back off coming here double click triple click to select it all bucket tool paste it on and I have my 3d image now what we haven't done yet is scaled it and that's what we need the scale this that scale that for so now we're going to go back turn on the projected again coming here scale it if you need to know how to do this you can search how to scale a in Sketchup and I'm sure there's lots of tutorials so scale that what did was that that was how okay that's 200 meters 200 scale the model yes so now it is scaled now obviously got a little bit of fixing up to do I'm not gonna go into how to do that but because I mean I got my my map repeating itself but the piece I have I have the piece I want which is farmen Haneen which is this is some training columbia and i have my 3d map scaled to scale so i can actually come in here and take measurements and it will actually tell me how far it is and i didn't scale this correctly by the way which you might notice this is 200 meters so i got to go do this once more now it's scaled correctly should be about 300 meters from here to here 500 meters yes so now I have my I can turn off my projected and there there you have your 3d piece of geometry now you can cut the pieces out you need you can cut off this stuff down here you don't need it the rest is just modeling and Sketchup hope this is useful for you any comments or questions you can post them thank you

Channel: Brandon Ballard

Views: 16,471

Rating: 4.8951964 out of 5

Keywords: Sandbox, Tools, Building, Terrain, from, Contours, SketchUp, architecture, tutorial, workflow, site model, context model, google earth, 3D Modeling (Profession), technique, SketchUp (Software), Curves, land, mesh, sandbox, heightmaps

Id: Qd2dqe3v7nU

Length: 16min 33sec (993 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 14 2018