A mate of mine has introduced me to a program and I wanted to bring it to the attention of anyone scratch building buildings. The program is Google sketch-up and from what I understand it is the tool used to create the buildings for Google earth.

What is most amazing about this program is its simplicity of use. I've made a quick model to show you guys the potential.

I started with a photo from the reference section of this site. The photo is Norm27.jpg
First off Sketch-up offers you a means to match the perspective of a building by manipulating the vanishing points.



Once you have done that with a bit of care you can create a model of the house and project the image as textures.



Once you have made the model you can manipulate it in 3d



What is really amazing then is you can get it to give you real dimensions based on the model you have made. (you can use the man figure to adjust the scale or use its guides system to make distances absolute)



I think the potential for this program makes it worth exploring.

wow thats definetly worth looking into, any idea where i can download this???
cheers

http://sketchup.google.com/

This program is the best! I have used it before...and for free its great! I have some pics in my photos. I'm on my cell mobile web so I cannot post pics.

Great tool, thanks for showing it.


Claude

Does it give you the UVW textures too?? If that is the case then it should be easy to make a model from those textures... Very interesting indeed

It doesn't do UVW mapping in the same way that a program like Max does. You can use projected textures, inbuilt textures and make your own textures but you don't get precise details of the mapping.

However there are the snap views and the projection tools. If I'm right then what you are after is to have say the front of the house laid out flat which you can do.

G'day T.

Thanks for the link mate! Now all I gotta do is figure out how to use it Graphic software and I don't mix too well

Rudi

Hey Rudi,

I've used a few 3d programs and this one is by far the easiest. Here is a link where you can find a good collection of tutorial videos:-

http://sketchup.google.com/training/videos.html

Also if you get stuck or need a hand just drop me an email or a pm

I especially like the fact that you get the dimensions on the flattened images! That is way cool!