Import 3D Google Maps into SketchUp Using PhotoCatch (MacOS Photogrammetry)

this is google earth this is google earth in sketchup okay so we have google earth just so we're clear this is sketchup with google earth information in it hi i'm joe skiba i'm an architectural illustrator i've been wanting to do this for a super long time 10 years 15 years i don't know i spent some time yesterday trying to figure it out again if you're on a pc there's probably a different way well there is a different way in on the pc it's probably more accurate but i'm on a mac this process is super simple and it works i'm amazed and when you see how it works too you'll be amazed too so how do we get google earth into sketchup let's look at how we do that can you tell i'm amazed okay so we're going to use a program called photo catch it's photogrammetry so we're going to and to use this is the website i downloaded it runs on on the mac okay so here's the program itself right here like this is it this is all there is and photogrammetry is the process of selecting a bunch of images or a video and then the software creates a 3d model okay so we need we could do a series of images making a video is way easier so we're gonna make a video from google earth and how do we make a video out of google earth there's different ways to do it i'm just gonna use quicktime i'm going to start a new screen recording right so i'm basically just going to record the screen save it as a video file and load it into this program i'm going to hit record okay so here we are this is google earth i'm gonna scooch around here basically you're you're you're trying to capture all the sides of the building and the top and i'm just moving around here you can see that i'm actually not being all that careful about it but you want to get all the sides and the top let's go up to the top like right here all right so let's just circle back around just for good measure and then i could hit stop right i'm gonna save this is the video that we just made we did a screen capture right so if i play this this is just what we just did in google earth right so there's a video i'm going to hit save and let's just put it on to our demo did this before okay so we saved that video file i can close this down here's our photo cache program photo catch here we go we can do images or video we just made a video so let's select this video building pittsburgh and it goes through you can see here it's looking at all the frames of the entire video it's picking out what it needs i guess use every four frames it's using 263 images of the entire video i'm going to click done and i like to use the obj and these are different levels of refinement i found that the raw works the best i'm going to say create model after you create you know you you push this button right it goes it goes decently well uh i i did a couple of tests yesterday it took an hour it took three hours um right before this video i i tested this out it only took it like 10 minutes so we're gonna speed this up just a little bit and it doesn't actually apparently take that long and it creates what you're going to do is you're going to save out a an object file obj file and then you can import that obj file into your 3d program i'm using sketchup i just started learning a little blender if you people have ever heard of blender blender is pretty amazing photocatch is done processing the video so we're just going to save out our file here's the file format obj click save save it out as building 002 here's make a new file get rid of the default component we're going to go to the extensions sim lab importer you'll see that if you go to import under the native file menu there is no obj format so through the extension manager in sketchup is called simlab object importer obj importer and then we're going to go to our desktop here's the file that we just saved out sim lab to buy the program is eighty dollars they have a 30-day trial i paid the 80 dollars my third day trial is over 80 bucks to import obj files is kind of a lot but it works the sim lab importer does a pretty good job so sketchup is still thinking about it here and then once it is done processing you have to click and then there it is and again it is it is sideways so we're going to go to our styles here and just turn off profiles and we're gonna turn off edges the file needs to be scaled and rotated and moved into correct position we're gonna speed that up here and this is our final file it looks pretty good uh it even got like even these overpasses got the little indents in there everything's a little squishy that's fine you know google earth is a little squishy and you're going to video back to photogrammetry into a model it gets a little bit squishier even still but at this level you can the back of the buildings you can see how it sort of stretches that information out we were only focused on this one billing but if you look at just this area that's that's good stuff right there that's that's super nice and that that's it so we screen recorded you could re screen record from google earth you could screen record from google maps or you could take a video with your phone you could video your mouse and you could pull that file into photo cache and make a 3d this process pretty simple pretty easy pretty effective i think it works nicely appreciate your time thanks for taking a look have a great day [Music] you

Channel: DEPICTION

Views: 38,427

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Id: daLyg2b4vn0

Length: 7min 19sec (439 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 22 2021