Sketchup Blog - News and Notes from the Sketchup folks

New cities, new features in Building Maker

When we launched Building Maker a few short weeks ago we were unsure how everyone would respond. Given the massive influx of models we've received since it launched, one thing is clear - you like making buildings for Google Earth! If there's been a consistent request since we launched it's "more cities please!" So today we're adding eight more for your modeling enjoyment:

- Brussels, Belgium
- Rotterdam, the Netherlands
- Cologne, Germany
- Dortmund, Germany
- Boston, MA, USA
- Las Vegas, NV, USA
- Los Angeles, CA, USA
- San Jose, CA, USA

This release expands our city offering to three new countries: Belgium, Netherlands, and Germany. Brussels has architecture ranging from the medieval to the postmodern. Rotterdam has some of the tallest buildings in the Netherlands, as well as the famous cube houses. Largely rebuilt after World War II, Cologne mixes modern architecture with churches and landmarks from the Middle Ages. Church towers characterize the skyline of Dortmund, Germany. All told, there are some terrific (and challenging!) buildings to model.

In the United States, our list of cities continues to grow. In Boston, buildings such as the Massachusetts State House, Faneuil Hall and others along the Freedom Trail are prime examples of colonial New England architecture. Boston is also an epicenter for well known universities including Boston University, M.I.T, Radcliffe, and Harvard. Las Vegas has has some of the wildest and most unique architecture available, and should test the skills of Building Maker users. Los Angeles is the second largest city in the U.S., and the area we have added includes downtown L.A., Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and the UCLA campus. Finally, San Jose will be at the center of our largest coverage area in Building Maker to date. It will now be possible to model buildings in the area stretching from Gilroy, CA to Mountain View, CA.

In addition to the exciting list of new cities available in Building Maker, we've also introduced some feature updates that may interest you. First, we've introduced a Google Earth view in Location Picker. When choosing a location, you are now able to click the "Earth" view so that you can see what buildings have already been built in the area you are modeling in order to avoid duplicated effort or to look for buildings that need improvement.

Not ready to submit your model for review? Then use the new "draft save" feature. In the save dialog under "Additional options" you can now uncheck the check box for "This building is complete and ready for review." [Note: English only] This will save a draft version of the building and will not be reviewed for inclusion in Google Earth until a completed version is saved.

Finally, we've introduced a new primitive type - the "Freeform Polygon" [English only]. As the name implies, this primitive allows you to create a polygon with any number of sides. Of the primitives offered, this is the most free form shape, but it is also the most challenging to use because it is so unconstrained. It is best used when building on top of existing blocks using the snapping feature. We recommend that you first toggle off the snapping tool, drag and constrain the points of the polygon in multiple images, and then toggle on the snapping tool to glue the points to existing blocks.

We hope you enjoy these new features and building models in these new Building Maker cities.



Permalink | Links to this post |
The comments you read here belong only to the person who posted them. We do, however, reserve the right to remove off-topic comments.

5 comments :

Unknown said...

The addition of Rotterdam to the list is awesome, but all Building Maker models created in Rotterdam seem to get placed +/- 5 meters from their geographical spot. Since other cities on the list don't have this it would be nice if this were to be fixed.

Unknown said...

Rotterdam is a very welcome addition to the growing list of cities, but the problem Maserati describes means more steps to create Rotterdam buildings. We have to use Google SketchUp to correct each Building Maker model's position. Please fix this!

Unknown said...

Is there a way to customize building maker so you can load and work wit your own building pictures, in case your building is not yet between the modelable cities. Are the building maker features available in the google earth API?

unicorn said...

Hi Maserati, As an architect, I'm working on a design for a housing tower in Rotterdam, Jufferstraat. I have a few questions: 1. Can unbuilt projects be placed in this 3d environment? 2. Can that model be tagged so that it's not visible for public? 3. Would you be interested in building it? I already made an exact 3d model in Vectorworks, from where I can ecport to several formats, and import also from Sketchup. Regards, Jeoren Hoorn, jh@jeroenhoorn.nl

unicorn said...

postmaster, can you ell me how i can get in direct contact with "Maserati"?