Google Earth Studio Tutorial | Easily Generate Aerial Animations of Any Spot In The World

foreign [Music] so I want to tell you about a tool that I have found extremely useful and that is Google Earth Studio you've probably used Google Earth and Google Maps before but with Google Earth Studio you can take that same imagery and make full-blown animations keyframed and with camera targets with fly around type animations and it's all built into the Chrome based Google Earth studio and it's super slick so I wanted to check it out with you guys it is solved a specific problem in my workflow in a very good way so that makes me think it's probably useful to some of you as well the cool thing about it is it's free it's super easy to use you do have to apply for it right now it's kind of like in beta they're looking for feedback you have to sign up to try and get access to it I do have access to it and I'll show you how it works and how slick it is I think you'll really enjoy it one of the awesome things about it is that it can do camera tracking you can you can put tracker spots in your animations and export them into after effects and Export a 3D camera into after effects and from there you can take it and bring it into Max and add your 3D models to it so in reality when you combine something like Google or Studio as we'll see with 3D elements and 3ds Max and the camera tracking when you combine those things together and then you just animate in something like Vantage you can have an aerial flyover of a 3D project some construction project that doesn't exist yet right that you've built in 3D you can have an aerial flyover of that in just a matter of maybe hours instead of days and no need to go out and get Drone footage no need to wait for just the right lighting just the right time of day any of that stuff obviously if we want a very very high end image we'd still want to go out and get Drone footage and get the perfect lighting and everything but in a pinch and for other projects that are maybe smaller with less budget this is a very good alternative that can be easily achieved from you know without ever leaving your desk so let's check out how you would do something like like that that's how I'm using it in my workflow and I find it to be a very nice solution that I think you guys will enjoy as well super easy to use let's get into Google Earth studio and I'll just show you what I've been doing okay to get to Google or Studio you just go to google.com Earth slash Studio try your studio okay I've already been accepted into Earth studio so I can just go to it for you to use it you'd have to be accepted as well but eventually it'll be available to everyone so I'm going to start with the blank project just to show you we can call it YouTube test two and just hit start you'll see that I'm in multi-view right now so I can change my views but this is the important view over here for right now we can put that as the single View I actually like it as double though too so I'm going to go to Salt Lake City over here just zoom in just like Google Google Earth it'll show the camera to where that's located we get all the way in here and we can hold down alt and tilt and let's just say we want to do a flyby of these buildings right here so we can just set a keyframe keyframe all attributes of the camera then we move to a new time and keyframe it again now if we hit play we have quite a nice little flyby of downtown Salt Lake City here okay pretty cool we can keyframe this however we want so say we want to say we want to do this do fly by and then over here we want to now turn around keyframe it again so now we do our flyby and then as we get here we turn around we whip around quickly terrible animation but you get the point we can change these ease in ease out points these arrows mean ease in and ease out we can make it actually linear so that it's more of a linear transition which is pretty rough right we'd at least want to ease it in here so that it comes to a soft stop like that and of course we'd probably want this ease in and ease out too so that it's not such a you could actually put this to Auto ease anyway terrible animation but you see the kind of control you can have over it let's delete these let no let's just delete this and make that ease in make this ease out so we just have our nice linear animation here okay super cool tools that you would be fully used to if you've ever animated in 3ds Max before right nothing crazy you have control over the pan the tilt of the camera and also the position so the position and the rotation you can also add attributes like a camera Target field of view animation time of day animation clouds 3D building animation meaning basically just turning it off and on the role of the camera can also be animated I don't need any of those we can set up a a camera Target so say as we're flying by this building here we want to focus on it we could say set camera Target right there now our position is staying the same the position animation stays the same however the rotation is now being completely overridden by the target okay so it just looks like this you slowly come in focusing on that building the entire time okay now we can see over here that we have come on we have the camera path showing here okay so the camera just goes from here to here you can actually see some of the the curve in the line here and you can actually change some of the curve in the line here make it perfectly straight or we can make it more like this okay but you can also see our camera Target now we can export this path into 3D which is very useful but not without tracking points right so we can right click on this and set a tracking Point here too we can set a tracking point on the very tip up here set one there and you'll see that they hug that building perfectly as we go so if we export those into 3D and how to model this in 3D then we could match up the tracking points in relationship to the 3D building we had of it and that would put our camera in the exact right spot just I'll show you a little bit about how to do that let's talk about how we would render this first of all when we go to render we just have to we have to have this logo on here which we can put anywhere I like to put it down in the bottom right we can set it up so that our tracking points are exported to a file that after effects can use very useful and then we have the choice of doing an image sequence which is going to render locally and a video MP4 which would render on the cloud now I usually would do an image sequence especially if I'm going into after effects just because that usually works cleaner but since the the cloud render is too tempting so I've been using video and just waiting for it to be done and then in After Effects I can spit out an image sequence from there if I want but either way so one thing I haven't been able to get it to do is in the cloud when I render the video I haven't been able to get it to also render this 3D camera stuff maybe that works when you do the image sequence but in alternative let's just send this to render real quick just hit submit and it'll go into the cloud and it'll just tell you when it's done it's fantastic okay but for the tracking points we can also just go here and say export 3D tracking data to a jsx and Export it track points and 3D camera path okay great now while that's rendering in the cloud let's just look at a another thing that I another thing that I find extremely useful so if we go to new project let's do the orbit one that's the one that I like because when you're doing like a drone shot I mean that's that's often what you're doing right you're orbiting around a specific spot which has your project in it so again let's go to Salt Lake City where is Salt Lake City here let's go to the basketball arena okay and we'll Center our animation right you can see this little cross here you just Center that right on the point of interest that you want to circle around then hit next and boom we already have an orbit animation of that of the Vivint Arena what is it now the Delta Center okay and then you can just adjust the altitude you can adjust the radius which basically brings our camera further out start heading Target altitude this is all fine right here you can make a clockwise or counterclockwise everything looks good and then just tell it how long you want it to go it's looking pretty smooth so let's just accept oh and our other render just just got ready so we can go in and view it and then just download it like this just say download tell where to save and boom you got it okay so with this one let's let's actually use this let's put a camera track right on each corner of this building and we'll in 3D maybe I'll try to put something on the roof of it or something oh we missed one there we go all four corners okay so if I export this animation and some track points see if we can put something on the roof of this building easily please hold okay in After Effects let's just open let's just start a new project and import my video so let's just import this Arena video into here make a new composition of it here's my fly around that's actually really clean right I like this the only thing that's going to struggle is trees and little small details okay now what about the tracking well if you go to script scripts run script file and then just go to our script that we exported from Google Earth studio just run it it'll take a second cannot find Earth Studio footage files locate footage before proceeding yes I'm not sure why that happens but you just have to go back and tell it where your footage is that you're using okay it actually re-imports it okay you can see it generating all our tracking points and you can see up here that the footage got re-imported and it's like it made a new yeah it sure did it made a new composition for me with that same footage re-imported again so now there's double of everything okay so you could skip the initial steps I did and just run that script right away if you want now you can see there's kind of a lot going on here I I don't need the text boxes so I'll just turn those off but you can see there's these weird rectangles in here those are our tracking points and they're actually tracking to this point of the rectangle it's just the rectangle is how it's visually showing it to us I don't know why it's so weird it's not the most visually useful tracking point because it just kind of gets in the way of everything but it is a 3D tracking point and there is a 3D camera in here that can now be used in 3D and you can see they hug they hug the the corners of this Arena perfectly and the can the camera path is already in here it's already ready to go into 3D so we're kind of just using After Effects as an intermediary here and the question is now how do we get this into something like 3ds Max well for that you need a third-party script that can just take these tracking points and it basically writes a script for the exact position of these tracking points and keyframes the camera exactly to the path that is in here this 3D camera okay I don't actually have the script loaded on this computer but I do have it on another one so I'll go export it from there but let me just explain to you what it does the script that I'm using is called AE transfer 3ds Max okay so go to here and you'll have to read the instructions here and get it all installed but then in After Effects it will look like this you'll go to the scripts and it will actually just have on that menu item instead of run script it'll actually just say AE transfer there and you can just hit it and it will export it using these settings here and then you'll import it into Macs but you'll need some sort of third-party script like this to translate those tracking points into a script that can then be run in 3ds Max so again we're just using After Effects as the the midpoint because Google Earth will export something that after effects can understand and then from there you have to export from after effects to something that 3ds Max can understand but it's all the same information just going from one software to another so once you have that script exported using a transfer you can go into Max and then you're good to go I talk a lot more about this in my course which is all about drone compositing or compositing 3D with drone imagery I have a whole course about this because there is some tricks to it and some ins and outs of doing this camera tracking in a in After Effects and exporting the tracking points and all that stuff there's it can get a little bit confusing but if you already know how to do that this is how you generate the scripts and you're good to go if you know how to use those scripts properly let me just show you a simplified version of how to do that in 3ds Max okay in Max there's a couple things you need to do you need to get an image sequence of your video to use as the background you need to have it set it up so the background can play properly basically get the video working in 3ds Max and like I said there's a little more to this process than you know I'm going to go over in this YouTube video but I do have a full course about this entire process in depth okay but you have to get the video working in here with the right aspect ratio and then you need that script and to run the script you just go to scripting run script and then find your script okay so the global scale is kind of a hard thing to figure out I don't even know what it's based on you kind of just have to use trial and error to figure out what scale but that's that's telling it what scale to come in at so we'll just try it at 0.1 and we'll see how that works create okay now I'm going to turn off my video background and just go to that camera I just imported there it is so you can see that's the scale if we had changed the scale then it would make these farther apart from each other obviously but you can see the camera has all the keyframes in it and actually if you look through this camera and turned on my background back on you'll see that it's just like we saw before all the tracking points sitting right on the corner of the Arena now to get this to fit into real world scale so that these tracking points are all matching in exact size of this Arena and everything that's kind of the tricky part and they get the camera to all match but needless to say if I put a box right here between these tracking points okay let's say I put a sphere in here like this something really weird with the scale and the location of the camera and that's the part where you'd have to fidget with it and things and again too much for this course or for this video I do go over all that in my full course but there is a sphere that's all funky that's the thing when these camera things come in you can't expect them to be in the right orientation or the right scale or anything like that that's the tricky part okay so I had to get the scale closer to correct and this whole this whole assembly closer to zero zero zero in order for it to not be glitchy so there's there's a lot to try and get these tracking things to work in 3ds Max but the point is I do have an object sitting on top of the Arena and if you get the tracking just right which you have all the tools and information to do you can have a very nice high quality composited image where the 3D and the Google Earth footage match exactly so powerful tool there's more to it than what I've been able to show here because that would be too long of a video but the point is Google Earth gives you the ability to have quick animations exported using Google Earth imagery the as you saw the animation is very simple and it also gives you camera tracking so you can take it to that next step and composite your 3ds Max renderings into those Google Earth videos so super cool very good alternative to having to go out and get Drone footage not going to be the same quality but very good in a pinch so hopefully you've enjoyed this and you saw you can see what some of the capabilities are that is Google Earth Studio okay I hope you found this as useful as I have um I've been using this and think it's really great to have the ability to animate in Google Earth with their Google Earth imagery so quickly easily efficiently and it's actually spitting out pretty good quality stuff so like I said it doesn't it doesn't replace the need for really high-end video imagery and actually going out to the site and getting really good Drone footage and stuff like that but it does make it it does offer more possibilities to offer a client that maybe wants an aerial animation but can't afford high-end stuff and just need something quick this is like a really good solution for that kind of thing so hopefully you found it useful hopefully you can figure out how to integrate it into your 3D workflow if you want a course that's all about the after effects part of this and 3D compositing with video and Camera tracking and that kind of thing then check out my courses I'll put links down below for that but I have a course that's specific to using after effects to do camera tracking and compositing it with your 3D stuff so that part can get a little bit tricky there's some tips and tricks to it there's some workflow things that you have to figure out so it's worthy of a full course you can check that out if you already know how to do that then you're ready to jump in with Google Earth Studio start generating animations and adding your three elements to it as you see fit and I love how easy how free the process is in this case and how I can I can now make promises to people like yeah we can get you an aerial animation even in my head when I'm thinking like except that the weather is crap right now I don't know how we're going to get a drone out there you know I can I can easily just say yes we can have you some kind of aerial animation even if we can't get Drone footage I have some solutions now that I feel a lot more confident promising to people in short periods of time and for low budgets so you let me know what you think of Google Earth Studio how you think you would use it in your workflow what kind of what kind of stuff you would use it for and if you think it's a useful tool let me know in the comments I appreciate you watching the videos please if you find them useful feel free to like And subscribe and I will see you in the next video

Channel: Adam Z - Learn Archviz

Views: 5,748

Keywords: archviz, learnArchViz, flyover animation, aerial animation, google earth studio, google earth studio tutorial, google earth studio archviz, archviz flyover animation without drone, aerial animation no drone, drone alternative archviz, aerial animations without drone, google earth studio camera tracking, aerial animation tutorial, aerial archviz animation, aerial archviz animation tutorial, flyover animation tutorial, flyover animation archviz, get access to google earth studio

Id: pFTRGBSVq34

Length: 21min 43sec (1303 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 03 2023