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.

The cruise ship Richard With.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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, 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%

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.

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.