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3D Models

3D Updates in Google Earth

September 23, 2014

A few weeks ago we created a KML of all the known areas covered by the automatically generated 3D mesh that Google is rolling out in Google Earth, and followed that up with some fun with the stats of the areas covered. Since then, we have been receiving regular finds from GEB readers. Last weekend was a particularly large batch with around 40 new areas. Our readers reported that at least two of the areas, La Rochelle and Clermont–Ferrand both in France, were available previously but had been temporarily removed.

So, given all this new eye candy, lets have a look at one of the locations and see what can be seen. We picked Bergen, Norway. The new 3D imagery generation depends on taking pictures from different angles and using that to automatically generate the 3D structure. This means that moving objects cannot be captured. It seems to do particularly badly with water, as the water is constantly moving and has a changing texture. However, cruise ships docked in harbor seem to be stable enough for fairly good imagery. We were able to quickly identify two of them because their names are actually just legible – something we were never able to see on ordinary overhead imagery. There is a third cruise ship in harbor that we were not able to identify so easily.

Richard With
The cruise ship Richard With.

AIDAcara
The cruise ship AIDAcara.

Prior to the 3D mesh update, there was a 3D model of another ship the Costa Medterranea made by LadZ who has made quite a number of ship models that you can see in the SketchUp 3D Warehouse.

Costa Medterranea
The cruise ship Costa Medterranea.

Back in 2005, we pointed you to a network linked KML showing the current locations of all Costa Cruise ships and amazingly, it still works! However, we found that if you leave it running for a while it can crash Google Earth. You can use it to find the location of the Costa Medterranea above. We also showed you in 2009, an excellent site Marine Traffic that shows the current positions of nearly 70,000 ships, including locations of Richard With and AIDAcara.

And for cruise ship enthusiasts out there, at least two more are visible from Street View.

Recently found locations with 3D imagery are:

Belgium: Antwerp
Denmark: Esbjerg
France: Ajaccio, Auxerre, Montpellier, Montauban, Carcassonne, Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Clermont-Ferrand, Albi, Roanne, Tarbes, Vannes, Laval, Gujan-Mestras, La Rochelle, Quimper, La Roche-sur-Yon, Cholet
Germany: Stuttgart, Schweinfurt
Greece: Argostolion
Ireland: Dublin
Italy: Milan, Piacenza, Pavia, Syracuse, Parma.
New Zealand: Auckland
Norway: Stavanger, Bergen, Brevik / Eikstrand / Porsgrunn / Skien, Lillehammer
Spain: Cuenca, Jerez
Sweden: Norrköping, Växjö, Karlstad
USA: Oklahoma City(OK), Memphis (TN), Expansion to New York, Alexandria (LA)

And a big thank you to all contributors so far:
GEB readers ΜaNos ΠαΝ. ΠαπαΝικοΛάου, David Timpe, ehog, bubollofo, Jonah, Anxo, Uri, alfski, Rogério Coelho, jebster, Anton Rudolfsson, CB, Sebastien, Chris, ChrisAjayi, Frank, Ryan, Wikipedia editors.

Filed Under: 3D Models, Sightseeing Tagged With: 3d imagery, cruise ships, marinetraffic

Flying around with Blue Magpie Tea in Taiwan

September 17, 2014

Over the years we’ve seen some great files come from Steven Ho, such as his panorama from the top of Mount Everest, his tribute to Steve Jobs and his Trip View Bowl visualization. He’s back with another one, which follows the path of a blue magpie as it flies along the Xindieng River, to promote eco-friendly tea farms.

blue magpie tea in google earth

The unique part of this is the way he controls the camera during the flight. Steven says it was quite challenging to control the perspective like a movie scene. If you just keep the bird in the same position on the screen the results are inferior. So he has the camera move around the bird to get different perspectives, with the bird even going off camera for brief periods. Also, to get the bird to appear properly in Google Earth he enlarged it several hundred times, which has the added benefit of making it easier to control the perspective.

You can try it for yourself by loading this KML file, or read the full write-up on his blog.

Great work, Steven!

Filed Under: 3D Models, Flying, Tours Tagged With: blue magpie, steven ho

SketchUp 3D Warehouse URL issues

September 16, 2014

Back in 2012 Google sold SketchUp, the excellent 3D modeling tool that was used to make most of the older 3D models found in Google Earth. In October 2013, Google stopped importing models from the SketchUp 3D Warehouse, and now solely rely on automatic generation methods for 3D imagery.

Earlier this year the 3D Warehouse was completely revamped by new owner Trimble. Also, at some point, the URL for the warehouse has changed from the Google domain (sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/) to a the sketchup.com domain (3dwarehouse.sketchup.com).

Google has implemented redirects on the former URLs, but they are not all working correctly. The result is that links that we created in the past to KML/KMZs of models in the 3D Warehouse no longer work correctly. Instead of being redirected to the download of the KML/KMZ, they get redirected to the SketchUp model (.skp) download instead.

Also, it seems most of the links within Google Earth relating to 3D models are broken. If you click on a 3D model, a popup shows more information about the model. It used to display a small picture of the model on the right, but now there is just a question mark. In addition, almost all the links in the popup are supposed to direct you to the 3D warehouse, but most of them do not work correctly.

Broken links in Google Earth

If you have links to KML/KMZ files on your website then it is not difficult to correct them. Each model has a unique ID that has not changed. A typical old URL will look like this:

https://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/download?mid=2fc1bb50f5aaf8ab91735325f76051&rtyp=k2&fn=Stadhuis+1&ctyp=other&prevstart=0

To fix it:

  • Copy the unique ID shown in bold above.
  • Search for it in the Sketchup 3D Warehouse.
  • Click on the ‘Download’ button, and you should see two options, the Sketchup model and the KML/KMZ file.
  • Right click on the KML/KMZ link and select ‘copy link address’ (or your browser’s equivalent).
  • Replace your old link with this URL.

The new link should look something like this:

https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/warehouse/getpubliccontent?contentId=57bca5fd-1c8d-4e4f-a8a7-ca4985b230c3&fn=Stadhuis-1.kmz

Although the ‘report a problem’ link on the 3D building popup does not work correctly, we did use Google Earths ‘report a problem’ feature to let Google know about this issue.

Filed Under: 3D Models Tagged With: 3d warehouse, sketchup

Fun with KML areas

September 9, 2014

Last week we released a KML showing the cities covered by the new type of 3D that Google has been producing.

We thought it would be interesting to see how much area has been covered.

Tokyo in 3D
Tokyo, Japan, has the largest single area of 3D in Google Earth

Google Earth, does not have any built in feature to allow you to work out the area enclosed by a polygon. Google Earth Pro does have this feature, but only displays it for the selected polygon, so recording each of the 487 areas we have found so far would be quite tedious. Luckily, we found a helpful site, Zonum Solutions, which was able to take our KML file, and produce a list of areas. We compared the results of one or two of the areas with Google Earth Pro’s answers and found slight discrepancies. For the purposes of this post it doesn’t really matter, but if you use the above website for anything more serious it might be worth investigating which is the most accurate. We then got the country areas and US state areas from Wikipedia.

Interesting facts:

  • Tokyo, Japan, has the largest single area of 3D Imagery.
  • Vatican City has 100% coverage due to it being a very small country contained inside the 3D area around Rome.
  • The US has nearly three quarters of all the worlds 3D imagery.
  • California has the most 3D imagery of any US state.
  • Alaska is the only US state with no 3D imagery.
  • Africa and continental Asia, have no 3D imagery.
  • So far, approximately 0.06% of the Earths land area has 3D imagery.

Notes on the data below:

Some of the recent additions by readers of GEB are not included.
The fact that many of the areas include water, including parts of sea, was ignored. The country and state areas quoted are for land and water bodies within the country.
Areas that cross country borders or state borders, was not dealt with, except for two exceptions:

  • Vatican City was counted, but its area not subtracted from Italy’s area.
  • New Jersey, which shares two large areas with other states which are attributed to those states, was estimated, but not subtracted from those states.
Country 3D Area
(sq km)
Country Area
(sq km)
%
Covered
Argentina 928 2,780,400 0.03%
Australia 1,983 7,692,024 0.03%
Austria 1,034 83,871 1.23%
Belgium 1,068 30,528 3.50%
Brazil 1,971 8,515,767 0.02%
Bulgaria 652 110,879 0.59%
Canada 5,846 9,984,670 0.06%
Chile 152 756,102 0.02%
Denmark 564 43,094 1.31%
Finland 136 338,424 0.04%
France 10,976 338,424 3.24%
Germany 5,283 357,114 1.48%
Greece 118 131,990 0.09%
Hungary 1,818 93,028 1.95%
Italy 4,351 301,336 1.44%
Japan 4,356 377,930 1.15%
Luxembourg 108 2,586 4.16%
Mexico 3,425 1,964,375 0.17%
New Zealand 435 270,467 0.16%
Norway 150 323,802 0.05%
Portugal 220 92,090 0.24%
Romania 719 238,391 0.30%
Spain 4,767 505,992 0.94%
Sweden 580 450,295 0.13%
Switzerland 2,906 41,284 7.04%
United Kingdom 2,640 242,900 1.09%
United States of America 150,299 9,526,468 1.58%
Vatican City 0.4 0.4 100%
US State 3D Area
(sq km)
State Area
(sq km)
%
Covered
Alabama 6,068 135,767 4.5%
Arizona 2,964 295,234 1.0%
Arkansas 2,714 137,732 2.0%
California 18,690 423,967 4.4%
Colorado 3,674 269,601 1.4%
Connecticut 719 14,357 5.0%
Delaware 525 6,446 8.1%
Florida 4,910 170,312 2.9%
Georgia 7,997 153,910 5.2%
Hawaii 107 28,313 0.4%
Idaho 1,111 216,443 0.5%
Illinois 2,456 149,995 1.6%
Indiana 5,988 94,326 6.3%
Iowa 1,364 145,746 0.9%
Kansas 3,972 213,100 1.9%
Kentucky 2,514 104,656 2.4%
Louisiana 3,327 135,659 2.5%
Maine 1,941 91,633 2.1%
Maryland 499 32,131 1.6%
Massachusetts 565 27,336 2.1%
Michigan 5,840 250,487 2.3%
Minnesota 1,326 225,163 0.6%
Mississippi 979 125,438 0.8%
Missouri 2,814 180,540 1.6%
Montana 1,318 380,831 0.3%
Nebraska 1,015 200,330 0.5%
Nevada 770 286,380 0.3%
New Hampshire 1,513 24,214 6.2%
New Jersey 917 22,591 4.0%
New Mexico 1,427 314,917 0.5%
New York 3,871 141,297 2.7%
North Carolina 6,353 139,391 4.6%
North Dakota 1,104 183,108 0.6%
Ohio 4,019 116,098 3.5%
Oklahoma 429 181,037 0.2%
Oregon 3,268 254,799 1.3%
Pennsylvania 2,643 119,280 2.2%
Rhode Island 1,160 4,001 29.0%
South Carolina 4,961 82,933 6.0%
South Dakota 772 199,729 0.4%
Tennessee 2,909 109,153 2.7%
Texas 8,384 695,662 1.2%
Utah 3,508 219,882 1.6%
Vermont 254 24,906 1.0%
Virginia 5,321 110,787 4.8%
Washington 4,130 184,661 2.2%
West Virginia 1,508 62,756 2.4%
Wisconsin 6,184 169,635 3.6%
Wyoming 419 253,335 0.2%

Filed Under: 3D Models Tagged With: 3d imagery, KML

Google Earth automatically generated 3D areas

September 4, 2014

Thanks to GEB reader ‘ehog’ for letting us know that Győr, Hungary got the new 3D mesh recently.

Google first announced their method of generating 3D via stereophotogrammetry from aerial imagery in June 2012. As part of the announcement Google said that they expected this new technology to cover “communities of over 300 million people” by the end of the year. A year later, in July 2013, they were doing quite well and we counted around 150 cities with the new imagery. Progress continued, and in August 2013 Google announced that from October of that year they would no longer be pulling models from the Trimble 3D Warehouse as they wished to focus on more scalable methods.

This year we have covered the release of 3D imagery for Tokyo, and other Japanese cities, Christchurch, New Zealand, and London.

However, there has been no easy way to find the new automatically generated 3D areas that Google is adding to Google Earth. Google has not, as far as I am aware, ever released a KML with the locations as it often does for new satellite imagery.

Google has a list that can be found here. However, it is far from complete and even has some incorrect entries such as Forli, Italy which does not have the new imagery. It doesn’t even have some well known locations such as London, UK, which do have the new imagery.

The Wikipedia page for Google Earth also has a list of the new 3D areas, although it relies on helpful people noticing new areas and updating the list, and it, too, is not completely accurate. It does not, at the time of writing, include Győr, Hungary, and does not have all the entries from the Google list, such as Olbia, Italy, for example.

3D Mesh Map

So, we decided to create a KML file combining all the locations from the Wikipedia page, and the list from Google, and a couple of extras that aren’t in either list. And here it is!

We have included locations as given in the two lists, as well as the regions covered by 3D. We have made the KML a network link so that we can continually update it as we discover new areas.

Note that we have not included places that have the older type of automatically generated buildings that load as individual buildings. The newer method loads as a single mesh covering a whole area. Also note that the older type of 3D model does not display in ‘Earth Mode’ in the new Google Maps.

The best coverage is in California, and the worst is in Africa and Asia. Alaska is, I think, the only US state with no locations covered, but with its largest community, Anchorage, having an estimated 298,610 residents in 2012, maybe it didn’t quite make the cut.

If you know of any places not in the KML, please let us know in the comments below.

Filed Under: 3D Models, Google Earth News Tagged With: 3d imagery, KML

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