Get Google Maps 3D in Any Architectural Software (Tutorial - Updated method 2023)

hey guys how's it going it's de and today I've got another exciting tutorial for you guys I going to be showing you a new method on how we can extract Google Maps and put it directly into blender and then through blender we can Chuck it into Revit SketchUp and also Rhino right so we can actually export the mesh that we get and Export as a point Cloud so we can use it in Revit directly or we can export the textured mesh and then we can use it in visualization software such as nscap lumian and twin motion right this workflow is a lot easier because we are going to be looking at the blossom plugin that allows us to essentially just select part of the screen that we want on our maps and it will extract it straight into blender and then we can export what we need from there okay one thing to not is that this workflow is completely for free you are going to have to actually enter your credit card information just to kind of verify that you're a legit user but that's it okay so if you guys do enjoy this video or you actually end up using the workflow and you find it helpful I would very much appreciate it if you can leave a like on this video it does help the channel quite a bit and one other thing is I've also put the Discord Community down below right just in case you guys want to join and I do want to say thank you to these two guys on the screen because I did watch their tutorials and string them together in order to find out how to get the mesh into blender in the best quality so then afterwards we could export it into our architectural software so thanks for these guys and yeah let's get into it okay so here's a quick overview of the workflow we are going to use the blossom plugin in blender to extract the Google Maps API and then we're going to import this back to blender and once we have our city in blender we can export it as an fbx so we can import into SketchUp Rhino or endcap however if we do want to use this point Cloud to use it directly in Revit we are going to need recap photo to then process the mesh into a point Cloud so then we can import it directly to Revit you should have the majority of this software if you're a student part of the Autodesk aec collection however the only exception is the Rhino license of course and as well as andscape which I do believe they do provide student licenses for so make sure you check that out for the first part in terms of software that we need the first thing that we need is blender and as you can see I'm link this down below in the description the version that I'm using for this tutorial is 3 3.6.5 in case you want to follow along the next thing that we need is the blossom plugin right so there is two versions of this plugin the first one is free and that's the one that we're going to use on this tutorial it works completely fine when you get to gumroad you can you just hit zero here and just say I want this okay so over here we are going to extract the Google um Maps uh from using this plugin and we are going to get the textures from it and just to note there is a premium version of this plugin we don't need it for the tutorial but just in case you want to support the uh Creator or in case you want to at stuff with open street map right we're not going to focus that on the tutorial but feel free to check this out on your own Leisure uh they do have documentation which I will link uh down below or it's linked here and as you can see um you know just in case you want to follow this tutorial you can look at the documentation that they have and they even explain stuff about like getting the Google Maps uh API key and a little bit of stuff um saying uh stuff about it usage limits right so they've actually linked a lot of stuff here that you need for the plugin which is really helpful and the one last thing that we need this is the simply gone plugin okay so you just need to go to downloads or you can actually go back and as long as you get it now you know this plugin is going to start downloading for you okay this is a plugin that's by Microsoft you do as long as you sign in with your Microsoft email it'll be totally fine don't worry it's a legit plugin from them okay so the second thing we need is the Google API key right so I'm going to put this link in the description this guide will explain for you how to get it but I'm going to walk you through one thing to not though is that even though this is free this is free for up to 3 months right like I said you are going to actually have to put in your payment information but it's Google it's trusted afterwards if you want to see how much it's going to cost you you know you can look at this guide here and they've even got something like usage limits I haven't used it that long so you know feel free to read this document but overall what we need to do is we need to get our Google API key so the link I've got here so over here I'm just going to click on the first one that says creating your API key so you need to sign in on your Google account and then you need to click on the goto credentials page right so over here I'm actually signning in on my Google account and then if you don't have a project what you need to do is just create a project project there you go and you can call it anything and I'm just going to hit create great and once that's created you can see I was uh put somewhere else now I'm in my project 3307 I can go to keys and credentials right so over here what I want to do is I actually want to agree and continue blah blah blah you can see it's telling you what you're going to get all this stuff on the API I mean feel free to read this I'm just doing this through the tutorial payment uh verification is needed I'm obviously going to blank out this stuff so as you can see here you know I've approved my payment of 0 or0 P to my bank and then it says finish project setting up right and then over here you're going to have to fill in this list so once you've done that however you need to do I'm just going to say I'm here to explore all this different stuff uh you know you can do it as you need and once we've done that you can see you're going to get your API key right I've load it out you keep your API key private that's something you guys need to do in general if you're doing this type of stuff but you can see it says enable all maps API for this project and create budget alerts sure why not so now you go to the Google Maps platform right and now over here what you do is you need to protect your API restriction type I'm just going to hit maybe later you actually don't want it restricted right so for this one you can see it says Maps project needed to use map API so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to paste that API key that I've gotten before but just in case you forget it you can go to keys and credentials right once you've actually set it up and then over here you can hit show key and then of course you can copy it onto your uh clipboard right so I've got mine set up and one more thing that you need to do is you need to go to API and services so once you go to API and services the one that we need is the map tiles API right so you're just going to go here and hit enable and now you're done now we can actually extract Google Maps and Chuck it into blender so what you need to do now is actually install the simply gone uh SDK you know just install it I've already got installed uh but you can select it as a free version like I said you are going to have to sign in through your Microsoft email account but that's totally fine it is legit right Microsoft actually owns this company and with with this Blossom plugin uh from my previous tutorial I don't think quite a few people know blender but you don't have to extract this right you can leave it as azip and then we are going to install this plugin through the dotzip file right so there's no need to extract this so now that we've got our key and our software downloaded all you have to do is open blender and I'll show you how we can get going so I'm going to open blender 3.6 okay so as soon as we've opened blender we need to actually enable the plugins that we've downloaded right so you can just click anywhere on the screen to dismiss this message and for those of you that don't know blender here's a quick crash course of navigating right so I can just select everything on my screen here and I can press delete on my keyboard to get rid of them if I press down my middle Mouse button only and I move my mouse you can see I start orbiting around the screen right if I press shift and I hold down my middle Mouse button you can see I start panning around the screen right or just mooving my camera and then through my middle Mouse wheel I can just scroll and then it will zoom in and out so all we need basically to navigate is the middle Mouse wheel and then whenever you want to move you just need to press shift all right really easy to use so to now actually enable the plugins that we we've installed we need to go to edit preferences and over here what I'm going to do is I'm just going to write simply gone 10 like I said you did have to install this first and then we're just going to enable it right great now the next thing we need to do is actually enable the blossom plugin that we've downloaded so first of all what we need to do is we need to install it so I need to go to install and then like I said before all you need to do is just you need to go to that zip folder and then all you need to do is just hit install addon to the zip right you don't need to go to the actual um you don't need to extract the zip just need to extract you just need to install the zip directly and you're golden and now once that's there we just need to enable it there we go and now over here if I go to Blossom again sorry what we need to do is we need to actually configure a few settings here right so over here what I need to do is I need to put a directory and in this directory I recommend just creating a space on your computer where you have quite a bit of memory on your hard drive just because everything that we take from Google Maps is just going to be stored here that so blender can actually use this information right so over here here I've just created a specific folder for this one so I'm just going to hit accept and now what we need to do is you remember that uh Google API key that we got previously we actually need to paste it here right so this is actually saying that blender you know we've got the permission to use the plugin and over here we just need to paste our Google Maps key right and as I mentioned previously you do not share this key with anyone because if they do have your key that means that they can start um extracting Google Maps here and then if you are on a paid plan you are going to be charged for it right so this key you keep private so all we need do is just put our directory and our Google Maps uh 3D tiles key and that's it just click on these three dots here in case you don't have autosave preferences ticked you should by default in case you don't just hit save preferences and now let's get into blender so soon as I close that what you want to do is you want to press end on your keyboard this is like an actual uh tool bar and your addins are normally installed here right so in order to extract Google Maps it's incredibly simple you just need to click on Blossom here and then the first thing we need to do is we just need to click on select so you can see as soon as we click on select a Google uh Chrome web page will open for us right and now this part's really simple all you have to do just click on search and then you just need to select on the area you want to capture so on this part I'm going to do London shortage cuz I done this previously on my render do example and we can compare them and over here I'm just going to click on show rectangle selection one thing I'm going to say is uh for your first try limit uh kind of just play with the sizes here because I'm actually going to show this in the tutorial in a minute or two the different sizes and how long it takes especially you know when it comes to level of detail so just keep in mind but for your first try i' say do something fairly small like I'm doing here and then all you want to do is just hit copy here right and for those of you that don't know if I extract this you can see the coordinates are updating right on the bottom left here so this is what the Google Maps is actually using and then we're just copying it string of code and then if I go back to blender all I have to do is hit paste here and you can see this has updated and then I'm just going to say I actually want to use Google uh 3D tiles here and then over here you can leave these two fine and then for the level of detail like I said in a minute or two I'm going to show the different uh uh examples as you can see but for this example I'm do buildings with more details right so once I've done that I'm just going to hit import and now as soon as you hit import blender is look going to look like it's not doing anything but it is in the background and to make sure that it is doing something what you can do I mean you can trust this but just for those of you that are curious you can go to that folder that you saved you know where you set the directory and then over here if I go to 3D tiles and I go on Google we can see that these files are updating right so if I just click on it you can see that there are stuff that's you know our file sizes are changing and also you can see this new file is being created every second so it is kind of extracting something and it's processing something in the background okay so here's a capture test that I done right so this is a bit larger than the one I'm showing for the tutorial but I just want to make a point so this city here as you can see it's not the biggest one but the level of detail that I done for this one was buildings with more details right so as detail as it can be this took me over 15 minutes to capture right this is a fairly large but also not the biggest uh kind of area right and another capture test that I done was this one and this one was on the level of details uh of separate buildings right so as you can see we did lose a little bit of quality there but it wasn't the biggest especially if you zoom out but if you zoom in you know you can see that you are losing quite a bit of resolution there so keep that in mind but this one only took me 1 minute so keep that in mind all right as you can see it was much faster and if you're zooming out and you need an AO maybe you want to prefer to choose this one the next one I done was instead of separate buildings I done groups of buildings and as as you can see here we start losing uh resolution just so you know but this one was almost instant and the very last one that I done was a very large city or very large capture of London as you can see here this one took a few minutes and for the level of details I done uh districts right I didn't even do whole city and this relative to initial import does do what it says on the tin right so if I go here and I just uh push this there you can see that as my city starts expanding or the more that I capture the area you can see that it starts growing this is because Google well this caused the blossom plugin will actually automatically align your capture right because it is basing it uh to the relative import so you can do something like a very low mesh quality far away and then uh you know you can embed something with a higher level of detail closer so that's actually something you can do to maybe save a bit of your file size and of course you can join these objects uh so yeah maybe just keep that in mind okay here we are so this selection took me about 2 minutes or so okay quite decent and now it looks like nothing has been done right but if you go to the top right here you can see it says Google 3D tiles and Google 3D tiles right so you get a container and then the object for those of you that don't know blender so all you have to do is just zoom out a bit and now look at this we've got our Google Maps selection right now if you export a really really big part of your city you might not be able to see everything and what you need to do is you just need to go into this view here and then what you need to do is you need to extend your far click offset right so for some of you if you extend if you actually import something very big it might look something like this right so all you have to do is just uh extend send this far Clift upset so maybe make it instead of the default th000 something like 2,000 if you're seeing does require you to do that and over here by default it looks like we don't have the texture right that's just the blender by default so if you just click on the top here and you hit viewport shading look at that we've got our Google Maps extracted with its textures right and you can zoom in and as you can see it's quite decent detail right I mean overall the fact that how easy this was to capture simply amazing okay so now I'm going to show you a step that you need in order to actually process all these different materials into one so if I just click on expand here and if I click on this little material tab over here you can see that we have loads of different materials here right this isn't going to export nicely and it's actually going to prevent us from exporting it as a clean fbx or as one clean geometry so this is where simply gone comes in okay so what we need to do first of all is just click on our mesh here and then we need to go simply gone okay now what you need to do is you need to click add LOD component you need to go to basic and you want to hit aggregation with material baking okay soon as you click on that you need to expand it over here and then you have a few settings here okay so by default your material casters is going to look like this you just want to click on plus and you want to hit on uh advance and then you just want to hit color cter and that's it just leave that like that now what you want to do is you want to go to mapping image settings and then output material settings and then this texture width and height is very very dependent on your scene if if you do an enormous City you are going to have to make this texture say something like 10,000 or maybe 15,000 right you are going to have to make them the same value and the reason for this is something I'm going to show you right now okay so I've got a fairly decent mesh here so if I go here and I just uh click on my object here you can see I actually have to click on an object for it to say process and it will say Google 3D tiles so say for example let's say if I made this 4,000 all right just as a test just show you guys something so if I go here and I hit 4,000 and I click on the mesh and I hit process this will take a while this might take uh a bit longer than the actual extraction of Google Maps because it's automatically packing the textures for you don't pan around and blender don't do anything just click on it and wait for it to do its thing uh this can take a few minutes probably 10 15 minutes okay so right now it's been like 30 seconds and as you can see the progress has gone up to five like I said don't pan or move your camera cuz it will affect this just leave it and let it work so when it's done you are going to get a new object here that's called process mesh mode right or process meshed so this is what it looks like if I hide this here okay when I done 4,000 you can see that our object right so if I hide this process mesh and if I look at our new one you can see that it doesn't look that good the main reason why it doesn't look that good is if I go to my shading here right we can see that there isn't a big difference between our process mesh in terms of the actual mesh itself without the texture the main problem was that our texture wasn't big enough right so if you have an enormous City you do need an enormous texture in order for it to like maintain its detail so 4,000 for this example wasn't big enough so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to delete this okay I'm leave my settings here and then I'm just going to expand this to let's say something like uh I'm going to do something like 15,000 okay don't do something like 150,000 but do something like 15,000 you are going to have to play with this depending on how big you need your scene but for this one I am going to have to go back and I'm going to have to process again right and one thing to note like I said this process does take quite a bit of time so one thing to note is that if you do extract a large mesh from Blossom that is going to take quite a bit of time but this process in terms of um making all of these uh materials go into one clean material so it makes it easier in your architectural program and easier for export this is going to take quite a bit of time itself all right don't underestimate this step either okay there we go so we can see our process mesh works right and it looks much better than the previous one so if I go here and I turn this on or off you can see that it's basically the same quality in terms of the mesh maybe we are losing a bit of stuff there but I mean overall it seems okay right so the quality on of these pixels doesn't matter um you can obviously only go up to a certain amount in blender in terms of the image size okay and from this example you can see that when I made the texture uh width uh and height 7,000 instead of 10,000 it looks basically the same right so say if I go here so you can see that sometimes you don't always need 10,000 this mesh is a little bit smaller than the other one but you know if I did make the smaller you probably wouldn't be able to tell that much but this is something I want to show you guys right the fact that this value isn't always going to be consistent you are going to have to like tweet this value because if you do end up making this say something like 10,000 or something really excessive it is actually going to have implications on some of the programs that you end up importing later right because it is going to be a very heavy texture file so sometimes recap photo can't uh import this uh and I'm going to show you this later on in the video so just keep that in mind that this is a value that you are going to have to tweak and change okay but what we need to do now is we can actually delete this one here our previous one all right and we need to delete our previous Google 3D tiles and this meesh looks a little bit darker but overall what we want to do is we want to if you go to this uh material that you've gone here simply gone Cass material right if you see this base color if you expand it you can see that this base color or this image that it's got is called base color 0.001 right that's the one that we done the one the reason why I've got base color zero is because you remember when I done that previous test of the texture width being a th000 or the default one this is one that's generated so if I click on that one there you can see it doesn't really fit the texture anymore but this is the one we want to use right or the one that you've gotten from this uh from the one that's on your current live model so the what so what I want to do now is like I said I want to remove this here so I just want to hit this minus on blender and we've only got our mesh here but now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to create add new material right so it's a new material and now for base color I'm going to click on this little um icon here this little uh yellow one and I'm going to add an image texture and for the image texture I'm just going to add that base color the one that I've gotten from my latest mesh and as you can see this thing looks a lot brighter a lot cleaner and now what we can do is we can actually export our mesh if we wish however I am going to show you how you can actually remove part of geometry from your mesh just in case you want to actually put a proposed building on there right okay so more things about blender if press n again we're going to hide our mode and let's say just let's say if you want to save your settings so you don't have to keep on uh doing this cuz if you open blender again these settings will change what you can do is you can actually just go to these little icons here and you can hit save pipeline right so if I go back to my Blossom thing and you can save it as my pipeline that's fine whatever it is and you can just hit save and now if you just change something so let's just say if I delete everything here this is what it will look like again in the future for you but if you are using this workflow quite a bit what you can do is you can just click on this one and you can hit load Pipeline and you can go to that previous folder that you had can hit on my pipeline or whatever you call it and look at this it saved the settings that we have before in terms of um our uh resolution and also the material class right so one like little NE thing so useful tip in case you want that however like I said let's look at how we can actually edit our site out in blender right so from my previous tutorial I actually took out this building and one thing I need you guys to know is that through shortcuts blender if the main shortcuts I'm going to show you for now is actually on your number pad right for your keyboard so if I press five on my keyboard I go to orthographic mode and I can switch between parallel and orthographic if I press seven on my keyboard I go into plan mode if I press 9 I go into the um bottom mode and then like I said if I go to uh if I press six I can start rotating around my camera same thing with four and then if I do two and eight I kind of start affecting the kind of angle right in um blender also if if I press 1 or three or 9 I do start going into these other orthographic views so I can go on seven and I can hit on plan right now blender we're at the object mode right if we go here and we go to edit mode okay what we can see is we can see all these individual points that make up our mesh in blender right and this is what we need to select in order to remove our object so if I go if I press seven here and then if I press six I just start you know moving around my m so it's easier to select and if I want to press five so it's in a clean plan view what I can do is I can just hover over this and instead of tweak I'm just going to do select lasso right and now over here let's say if I want to get rid of this building I can just select everywhere around this right like you normally would in Photoshop or whatever you do and now what I can do is I can press delete on my keyboard I'm going hit delete vertices well now look only the top parts of the face were selected so if I go edit undo it's going to remember my selection and like I said only the top parts of my faces were selected what we need to do is we need to press seven on our keyboard again and now what we need to do is I'm just going to press Escape I need to go up top I need to select another point and over here there's a thing that's called toggle x-ray right so I'm just going to click on that and now over here if I start selecting the points it's going to select all the points that are selected within here right whether it's on the top shape or not as long as this is there because we're in x-ray mode which kind of like wireframe if I select it now it's going to select everything right going through the surface so now if I press delete and I press delete vertices we've got un rid of that building and there's a few points here which I just recommend deleting so I'm just going to press delete here delete vertices and now if I go back to my object mode we can see our texture and everything Still Remains the Same but I've actually removed that mesh so I can actually put our proposed building in there which is great however one thing that is uh one thing that you might find a bit annoying in your CAD software is that this isn't going to import to your origin right or you might want to set it to make it easier to import so if I Pine around here we can see that this is my kind of origin in a 3D software and it probably going to align with your one one but we probably want this to match with our proposed uh FLW level and probably make this to Center Point right so what we can do is we can go back to edit mode Here and Now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go back to uh tweak and now what I can do is I can just select one of these points here so let's say if I just want uh or if I sorry if I just go to select box and let's say if I want this point to be my kind of origin point so what I can do is I can press shift s in blender and I can do um cursor to selected so our cursor is now on that point and now what I can do is I can go back to object mode right and I'm going to go object up top set origin and do origin to 3D cursor okay so now over here this origin is at the 3D cursor okay it's not there anymore but now let's say if I click on this object and if I go to my properties here if I go to this object mode okay for some reason it didn't set but like I said as long as your um point is there if you just click on it and you go to object set origin origin to 3D cursor okay here we go we can see that nothing has changed but our object has updated its coordinates here so now if I just zero out or if I reset the position if I just click on zero here zero and zero look at that our object is now flat on our grid and just to confirm this if I press shift s again and if I say I want my um what's it called my cursor to the world origin so this is always like 0 0 0 or the flat point of it here we go it's back in the original position and this now is my origin of the mesh right so when I export this into another software this is where the origin of the scene is going to be and it just makes it easier for our proposed building in terms of positioning it right and as you can see really simple here and one thing I forgot to mention is that through the blossom plugin this mesh is actually to the correct scale uh through render do it wasn't and just in case you want to like check this what you can do is you can go to edit you can go to preferences again and you don't have to do this I'm just showing you if we just go to measure it you know just make sure it's enabled uh for you by default this wouldn't be and now if I just press n on my keyboard and I open up this toolbar if I go to view and I do have to be in edit mode for this if I go to I'm just going to disable the X-ray here if I go to measure it tools if I say to it add a segment so if I select two points for example if I just say I don't know between this point and this point and now if I hit segment right you can see it or add a segment for us or there was a few down here that was uh set for me before yours is probably going to look like this so if I just go from there to there and I hit add segment you can see we're going to get this and now if I hit show you can see this little thing popped up here right I can make the text a bit more prominent so let's say if I make it something like red and uh I can probably expand it a bit more just by hitting this clog wheel uh I don't need to but I'm just showing you guys an example but we can see from there to there is 8. 64 M and that's correct I mean I know that this mesh is correct cuz it's directly from the Google Maps API but I'm just showing you that and then you can obviously just hit um hide over here okay so the final thing that we need to do before we start saving our file is actually saving this texture right so if I go to um this little mode up top here you can see that we have a few different stuff right so right now um we are in the actual 3D view Port but one thing I want you to do is actually go to the image editor right and over here uh you can see a few stuff but if you click on this little part here that says uh you know over here is how we can actually select the texture that we've got so over here for the space color 001 this is our texture that fits the entire mesh right this one mesh and what you'd need to do is I mean as you can see you can even see some facades here but it's quite cool and this was the reason why um you know before the mesh was uh really kind of ugly to be honest uh because the resolution wasn't big enough so if I just go here between base color zero you can see the difference in sizes right in terms of why one has a lot more detail because it has had a lot more pixels so if we just go here what we want to do is we want to go to image save as and you want to save this in anywhere on your computer well ideally to your export folder where you want this so I'm just going to go to Blossom tutorial and I'm just going to I'm not going to rename anything I'm just going to leave the setting same I'm just going to hit save as image okay and now what we can do is we can go soon as this is saved give it a bit is a big texture we can go back to our 3D view port and then I'd recommend saving your scene if you haven't done so already just because you know it has been a while since we're working on this right so I'm just going to call this entitled. blend just to be nice okay now we're actually going to be looking at how we can export this to get into our CAD software finally right so the first thing that we're going to do is looking at how we can export this as a point Cloud so we can get into Revit directly so the very first thing you need to do is you just need to go to file export export this as an fbx okay now when you export this as an fbx the only things that you need to do here is that you need to make sure that the path mode is on copy and you need to click on this little um icon here that says embed textures right and there's one more thing that you need to do is you need to make sure that forward is set on y forward and now you just need to hit export fbx and this is the reason why you have to choose the forward axis to be on the right position otherwise your site will be in the wrong axess right so just make sure you keep that in mind and as soon as that file is exported you just want to check it you just want to go to the export folder open the file and then it will open with the windows default 3D viewer and over here you can see we've got our mesh with our texture right so everything looks golden so we know that we can carry on with the next step and one thing that I want to show you guys which is quite interesting is the fact that this texture alone right just the texture is 150 Meg right remember we've embedded this texture directly into this fbx so the measure is only about 30 kiloby but this texture has taken up 150 that's why I said it can take quite long and it can get quite heavy if you have a larger city right so all we have to do now is just open up recap photo as soon as that's open all we can do is just import that mesh and then we can export it right so over here recap photos imported quickly just going to close it I'm just going to go to uh load model right that's all we need and then I'm just going to select this one I'm going to hit open okay your model should open quite fast and essentially all we're using recap photo for is just importing our fbx mesh and then exporting it into a different format right we're literally just using it for file conversion we don't need to change any settings in here okay and something that I want to show you guys is that this fpx that I have open is the 190 fpx file right this thing is quite big as we can see windows is fine with it I mean uh you know this is the one that had the 10,000 width and height and this has the overall extent of the city however when I import this into recap photo as you can see it says there's some issues that are found you can see that the mesh load's fine however the textures don't load with it that's because the textures were so big that I wasn't actually able to process it however if I go back to the other file that I had open so if I go to this the this one this is the Untitled fbx 01 as we can see this file was 80 Meg I've only cropped this uh City by uh a little bit but the main part that made the file size so much smaller was the fact that I made the um material width 7,000 instead of 10,000 right and as you can see this looks fine and recap photo will actually open this one perfectly fine so if I just go file close load and if I open up 01 open overwrite this part is completely fine but you're going to see here now that we aren't going to get any errors and that recap photo can open this one and this is what I was saying to you before you do need to be careful with one the extents that you choose in terms of the time that you load but also the texture resolution right because I know that some people are just going to want to max out their settings because they think it gives them the best results but your programs won't actually be able to open it right you do have to find the uh kind of solution in between especially I've got quite a powerful computer if I me honest I don't think uh everyone especially if you're uni student on your laptop you're going to be able to process some of these models so just keep that in mind as we can see recap photo opens this one's okay opens this one fine okay and in order to export this model all we have to do is just go to export export model and then our file format is going to be RCS right and then the points per me squar you just leave that at 100 it's fine uh for this and also I found that sometimes if you change it for some people the textures won't export so just leave it at 100 and you'll be totally fine so now we're just going to export this as intitle one sometimes this can take like between 15 to 20 minutes depending on the size of the actual mesh uh it is a long process but all you have to just wait for it yeah okay and soon as the point Cloud's done all we have to do is just go to a 3D view or view of your choice and we just go to the insert tab in Revit Point cloud and then I'm going to choose this uh one that I've done right so here I'm going to choose you can choose Center to Center or if you actually set the origin like I recommended in blender you can do origin to internal origin and if I hit open here just wait for it if we zoom in and out we can see it load and one thing to note just in case you're a student and you're not too familiar with Point clouds if you hover over it you will get this kind of colored grid it might get a little bit annoying so what you can do is is you can just click on this once right as soon as it's selected we can pin it and then once it's pinned we can go down to the bottom here and we can choose select pinned elements right so if this is crossed now if our um what's it called if our Mouse is over this we're not going to be able to select it however if this was off or active you can see that even though it's pinned we can select it so this might just be a little bit of help so you can actually you know rotate around your site and then you are able to see what's going on and one thing to not is that obviously with Point clouds the um closer you go in is obviously going to appear less dense and further away so you do get this kind of uh what's it called this kind of vague look for it but panning around your site it looks really good these will be really good for some images as well and like the reason why this is helpful say if we go to insert link Revit as well and we Link in our proposed building I can obviously look at it from a plan view or let's yeah our plan view you see this is going to be very useful when you're going to start um uh deciding where your building goes for example let's say if you don't want to work with endcap uh but you can actually align your building there right so as I've done here probably a bit more accurate but look at this so now if I go to my 3D view as I mentioned before because we set level zero in blender through our origin this level zero of course automatically aligns with it which is fantastic as well so look at this I mean if we end if we made this realistic or overall it's just a good base point right in terms of when you want to actually align your building to Contex and actually work with stuff and of course you can actually measure distances uh if you know what's what all right it might be a bit better on the site view or another view but heyo you now have Google Maps into Revit directly through the use of a point Cloud so next up I'm actually going to show you how you can bring the textured mesh into endcap so you can use it for stuff like visualizations just in case you're not happy with the fact that you know when you zoom in it starts getting a little bit vague okay so in order to get our actual file into a visualization software like uh andscape we are going to have to choose a different setting uh I'm not sure why but this is just something that I found out Works a bit better so what we need to do is we need to go to file export and then we need to choose wavefront or which is a obj right so when you click on this one all you have to do is just make sure geometry on the if you expand it you just need to make sure right materials is done and you definitely need to make sure that previous step where we saved the texture was done with the fbx copying and embedding it you could get away with it but not this one then you just want to hit it and you want to hit export obj right however if you are going to import this kind of textured Mes in textured mesh into say SketchUp or Rhino you can use the fbx that we previously exported from the uh Point Cloud this is specifically something that I've had to do in order to get it into endcap which I'm going to show you now right because in this tutorial I'm mainly focusing on the Revit workflows so we got the point cloud and the nscap workflow okay and now let's say we want to bring our mesh into nscap in Revit right because we actually want to use this for renders so what we can do is we can actually go to the nscap Tab and in case your UI doesn't look like this I am on version uh 3.5 currently just so you guys know and essentially what I'm going to do is we just need to open up the asset Library okay and now what we need to do is we need to click on this little plus down here because we're going to add a new custom asset right we can't actually import the fpx into Revit directly with the textures the way they're currently mapped so we're going to use andscape to do this so you just want to click on switch to custom asset editor and then over here you want to hit import geometry and for this one you want to import the obj right you can't import the fbx but I feel like but I've tried this and I feel like importing the obj right is better so I'm just going to hit import obj however this is going to take a while this is quite a heavy file even for andscape so because we are importing such a large uh piece of geometry and as you can see here for now this is not responding totally fine this will take a bit of time right and over here we can see that it has imported okay and now one reason why I recommend the obj is because this actually loads the texture for us automatically when I tried fbx we actually had to manually insert the texture it isn't that much trouble but it's just nice to have right just because it's really easy for us and look the orientation is completely correct for us as well uh which is another important thing because if you use the fbx for recap photo or Rhino it's going to be one way however in nscap it's going to be another one so as you can see here we've got our um mesh that's in endcap and just like um blender if you press seven on your keyboard once you're in this preview mode oh sorry no I believe it's five on your number pad you get your plan uh you get your plan view 2 6 84 get to your elevation views so I'm just going to go five just go back on plan m i can press my right uh I can hold my right my right I can hold my right Mouse button down so I can start orbiting around this left to move uh but then also if I hold shift and control and I zoom I can zoom in a bit faster and essentially what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to set a screenshot of it here right so over here I can name my custom asset which I recommend you do so I'm just going to call this shortage London description whatever you need it to do you can adjust these as you need in terms of roughness and all that stuff but I'm just going to leave it as it is uh for sake of tutorial feel free to Ed it this to yourself but we don't actually have a map so that's actually totally fine but see if this makes a difference for your renders and then this preview is going to uh load we'll let it load for a second just give it a sec and if you did actually want to uh put Place Soler geometry because this is actually just going to set as a bounding box you can do this I might I might make another tutorial but I feel like it's getting long already so all we have to do now is just click on this thumbnail because we actually have to generate a thumbnail for our endcap asset before we save it and push it through that's just one of the rules that it has uh so soon as that's done and we filled in our title and description you can see it says save changes and Export and that's exactly what I'm going to do here over here you can see it says asset exported so I'm just going to close this and then and soon as that's done you can see I have a few custom assets here because I've obviously tried it for this tutorial and a few other things however soon as it's loaded just keep in mind custom assets do take a while to load especially because I have tried quite a few map versions of this so if we got a gig of just random Google Map assets loaded everywhere all right so as we can see they're loading now and these ones are new and the one that I've actually uh done just now is this one I believe schit London there we go so I'm just going to double I'm just going to click on it and now over here look at this if I zoom out a bit I can place it I mean you did have to see the fact that you're zooming out for it and now if I go 3D it just looks like a box right this is because it's a bounding box this is what placeholder geometry does uh feel free to look at other tutorials on YouTube or check out my channel later on if I upload something however this is our context site so if I open up andscape now all right and now look at this we now have Google Maps loaded directly into ends scape so we can use it with our renders right one thing to note though of course the fact that Google Maps is a photo realistic thing so they do have shadows hard baited in them so even if I move my Shadows all the way here you know you can see a shadow there and there that is something you are going to have to live with it's a photo of the world Shadows do exist in the real world all right now I'm going to show you another trick here if I go to if I press five on my keyboard so I get the birds I view now if I also go to orthographic zoom out a bit uh if I press five just to make sure it's perfectly aligned if I go to my settings here uh my visual settings if I go to render quality Ultra image uh and if I just go to output and now if I go here and if I make my um I can choose export uh all this different stuff apply Alpha Channel and now what I can do is I can just go to Main and then if I just cancel this uh I believe and now if I hit render okay screenshot and now if I save this somewhere so let's just say if I go back to my uh tutorial folder I'm just going to hit andscape and save right now if I open up Photoshop right I think uh let's see if you know where I'm going with this the fact is I can't actually see what's in this bounding box it would be a lot nicer for my build it'll be a lot nicer in Revit if I could actually see what buildings were right but the fact that this is an nscap asset and the fact that this is such a heavy mesh I can't actually just load the mesh in itself as a placeholder cuz it will crash Revit so we can do a smart workflow so if I open up Photoshop so I'm just going to open up Photoshop there we go okay and now what I can do is if I just select everything I didn't even need the masking all fairness but I'm just going to do this and now that I've got this if I just go to image and I go to trim right and I say base it on this uh transparent pixels and I hit okay this is going to give us our perfect bounding box that we see in Revit here right so if I just now export this or save this same thing and just just going to call this one uh trimmed you know you can save this as you want now but it's fine okay so now in Revit what we can do is we can go to insert and we can choose link image and then that image that we actually exported from uh Photoshop the one that was trimmed exactly to the founding box what we can do is we can just open this and now over here all we have to do is just make sure that lock proportions are text right and for draw layer you can do foreground and I'm just going to place this in one corner there right and then one corner there you can make it uh exact if you want but this just for the tutorial sometimes I found you can snap but for some reason I can't right now but essentially what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to select this image and I'm going to make it on the background for now right and now all I can do is I can actually just click on the um planting I don't actually need this so I'm just going to hit hide in view hide elements right and now if I pin this you can even group them just to make them a bit more stable but right now what I can do is if I go to link Revit and I link in this previous building that I have and I open you see over here I can even start drawing what I want to show up in my andscape space because I've got this reference that I've taken from the render or over here if I want to be bit cheeky I can just do this and then rotate it how we need so this is just obviously looking as a rough example how did I want it before uh I think I want it like that but 180 that makes a bit more sense right so I'm just going to do there to there and now if I go to andscape or if I just go to my 3D view here and if I go to in that endcap photo I matched it to the endcap bounding box and now everything that I want to position there will be uh you know will align and like I said before the fact that we set our origin to the correct Point uh in blender so that everything that we put on level zero now matches with that uh point that we set makes it even easier right and now look at this we have Google Maps in Revit right which makes it so much nicer for our endcap renders I mean even if you go far away it'll look quite decent as a study and look I know this isn't a perfectly beautiful solution for Google Maps but I mean it is definitely better than nothing the fact that you've got it for free and the fact that you can actually use this to align other references is absolutely insane right uh I'm I really wish I had something like this for me in University but now let's look at how we can import that fbx into Rhino because I know a few other people like that okay so while I was editing this video I realized I actually forgot the workflow in order to import this uh Maps into SketchUp it's really easy however we do have to export in a different file format because SketchUp only has limited formats that accepts so you what you want to do do first of all is just select the mesh make sure that's selected in case you do have multiple on your scene you're going to go file export and then you want to choose the colada file yeah the Dae and then over here you just need to make sure that when you go to Geometry or when you go main you do selection only and that's it you do have to make sure that the texture was exported before like I mentioned previously but if you've done that and you baked the texture and you saved it if you just hit export colada soon as that's done it should be quite a quick process and over here you can see we get a Dae file and we also get the texture save that's why I said you did have to save this before in blender like the previous steps okay and soon as we're inside SketchUp all you have to do is just go to file import and you do need SketchUp Pro for this actually maybe I'm not sure but maybe this is something you guys have to check just to make sure that you can import the Dae file right um and in case you don't have SketchUp Pro you can look at all these other files that will work maybe a DWG will but I just done a collada uh so I'm just going to hit import it shouldn't take too long maybe a minute Max and you can see that now we can choose our point to place our component so I've just chosen there and now if I you know you can do this with more uh Precision in your model but now look at this we have our Google Maps obviously imported into SketchUp and you do see the meshes from the edges so if you do want to get rid of this what you can do is you can actually go to um window and you can go to default tray and you can enable soften edges right now if I click on this component here and then if I just make this go down down and before soften edges this part on the tab here let me just actually bring this down because I think my camera is going to cover it I can actually hit soften coer right this might take a second because it is a very large mesh and then I can bring this angle up a little bit more right so as I do this you can see we are losing our edges for this geometry uh I do think you are going to see quite a bit of it still uh as you can see we are losing just a little bit of quality as we do this uh equally so what you could do is just go to your um drawing mode so if you go to view and you go to Edge style and you take off edges and profiles you are going to get a cleaner mesh but this might impact your overall um building while your overall style for this however you can do two different exports as you can see here the moment you turn off your edges this looks okay the sof and co- planer part did help just in case you uh prefer to have that on for your building but maybe turn it off for this specific component okay so here we are inside Rhino this is just another software that I'm sure people would want it want this Contex to be in so you can just go file import and then you can click on the fbx that you've actually previously exported this is the fbx one right so this is the one where the texture was actually embedded within the file and then the forward was on y forward for Rhino you can actually use this file you don't have to use a obj but as soon as you hit import you can just leave it as it is and you can scale uh you can scale it as you need so I'm just going to hit yes just to make sure it's okay and then as soon as it's in you can zoom out a bit right so we can see our mesh has imported okay and then if I just make sure that this is on rendered and let's just give it a second look at that we can see that we have our Google Maps mesh uh straight into Rhino right uh through the fbx one as well and of course this is following the geometry so this is pretty amazing it's gotten even easier to get Google Maps into our architectural workflows of course this quality doesn't compare to a surveyed model but the fact that you can actually get a textured ma mesh of the real world right cuz this is using Google Maps API it's absolutely insane it's just getting easier and easier I do hope you guys find this helpful I mean I really wish I had this stuff when I was a student or I mean even early on before you maybe get a site survey right maybe for some bids or whatever just to work to some relatively accurate information for free and have some good uh points for your visualizations so yeah if you guys did enjoy this tutorial and this workflow I like I said before I would very much appreciate if you can leave a like join the Discord Community Check out the links Down Below in the comment and yeah that was it for this video take care guys cheers

Channel: Dev Creates

Views: 51,941

Keywords: google maps, blosm, blender, architecture, revit, google maps into revit, rhino, sketchup, tutorial, point cloud, fbx, enscape, twinmotion, D5 Render, Blender OSM, google maps import, google maps 3d, blender google maps, architectural visualisation, arch vis, architecture student, renderdoc

Id: 21HG6Q6uIfw

Length: 47min 47sec (2867 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 06 2023