Earthware Blog

UPDATE: Earthware’s Vscapes product now offers 3d Building developments for our clients in Virtual Earth and Google Earth. For more details see our Vscapes virtual landscapes page for details and client stories.

As part of an in house training exercise here at Earthware I went into town and captured some photos of the Town Hall here in Letchworth.

This building was constructed in 1935 and makes a nice challenge for anyone wishing to create a building for Google Earth due to its unique architectural features. The biggest challenge faced is the need to keep the model simple enough to not to exceed the restraints of Google Earth yet detailed enough to look like the building the model is designed to represent. Below is a short list of tip I believe are essential to creating an efficient Google earth model.

• When creating textures from photos always crop them and remove unwanted items from the picture as this will reduce image size.
• Always resize and save your textures at the lowest quality possible that still retains the level of detail you require. A good web texture is no more than 30k
• Remove all redundant geometry from your model such as the base plane of the model and any polygons that have formed within your model while you have been creating it.
• Create curved surfaces from a number of straight lines to give the appearance of a curve. For example if you examine the tower on the town hall model you will see that the curved dome is made up of a few flat angular pieces.
• Use your textures to show building details like windows and doors rather than modelling it for real.

These few useful techniques should get you well on your way to creating web efficient and Google earth compliant models in no time at all.

I have submitted the Town Hall model to Google in the hope that they will embed it in Google Earth so that anyone scanning the sights of Letchworth will be able to view it in its natural location. For now clicking on the image will take you to 3D warehouse and allow you to download the model to you computer or view it in Google Earth.

Let me know if anyone finds this useful!

Cheers

Chris

This project that has been recently completed represents a new venture for Earthware that puts our 3D and mapping skills to a new and innovative use.

Video: Stonish Hill WindFarm

We have used the plans from a local planning application for a proposed wind farm and created a scale virtual representation of the completed site in Google Earth including support structures and access roads. To download the Google Earth file containing this project please click here

The purpose of creating this video and accompanying Google Earth file was to support a local planning campaign the outcome of which was successful with the assistance of this video.

We at Earthware believe that this style of presentation is highly effective for a range of uses such as environmental planning or pre-visualisation as it accurately shows how a future structure will appear in the environment and the visual effect it it will have on the landscape.

As part of this video 3D models of wind turbines were built to scale as well as a local structure to give a real world comparison between the sizes of each. Below are the 3D models which you can interact with inside the windows by clicking the play button and following the on screen instruction to download the necessary file to run the player. please be aware the 2 windows will not run simultaneously so one must be paused for the other to become operational. Do this by right clicking on the viewer and selecting pause.

I would just like to say a big thanks to 3Dvia for their excellent model hosting service which provides these stunning i-fame viewers. If you like these models or wish to see other 3D models created by Earthware they are available to view and download from my profile hosted at 3Dvia.

If you are reading this blog and you have an vested interest in scale presentations within Google or Virtual Earth then please drop us a line and find out how Earthware can help you.

Chris

Multimedia Developer

The last 2 months has seen Microsoft invest more in Virtual Earth’s future than ever before. The two recent aquisitions to the Virtual Earth team seem to be building more and more skills in the mapping and 3d modeling arena.

In mid December 2008 Microsoft bought the UK based mapping provider Multimap. Multimap were one of the first internet mapping pioneers and have provided static mapping to both the public and businesses here in the UK for many years. In recent years Multimap have started reseller other providers solutions, including MapPoint and Virtual Earth and in the last 2 years have release their own interactive mapping solutions although I’ve not really seen anyone other than Multimap really use them. The real question is what does Microsoft want with Multimap, and where do they fit into the Virtual Earth team? It’s difficualt to see Microsoft continuing to sell the multimap products as there is little to distinguish them from Microsofts own offers. Multimap is a strong brand in the UK so I wonder if they will be used as the UK’s reseller for Virtual Earth / MapPoint?

Today a second related buyout was announced, Microsoft now own Caligari, the developers behind the long running 3d modeling program Truespace. Truespace owns a special place in my heart, being the first 3d modeling / animation package I used. Its simple but powerful tools made it a real champion of usability and I spent many an hour building model TIE fighers and animating characters. It would seem Caligari’s position in the Virtual Earth equation is more obvious, Truespace ‘could’ become the 3d modeling program to match, and infact beat sketchup. However what does this mean for 3dVia, the company behind the current Virtual Earth 3d modeling plugin? Microsoft have only signed a partnership with 3dVia so where does that now leave them?

It’s going to take a while for the dust to settle on these two aquisitions, but we will been keenly watching to see where the pieces land to hopefully make a stronger Virtual Earth offering.

To read the thoughts of Caligari’s Roman Ormandy about the buyout please see this post on the Truespace forums.

We are delighted to announce that NovaLoca and Earthware have agreed to enter into a partnership arrangement to launch 3D Virtual Neighbourhoods to the commercial property market in the UK.  The Virtual Neighbourhoods product will be promoted under the NovaLoca brand name and through the UK’s fastest growing commercial property portal.

For more information please contact Neil Osmond (Operations Director) on 0845 642 9880 or email neil@earthware.co.uk.

Hi Guys, its been a little while since I last Blogged so I will take this opportunity to wish you all a happy a new year. What follows is a few of our latest offerings, with one more to follow once I have finished it hopefully later today but as someone is coming in to pull down a wall in the office tomorrow I’m not sure I’m gonna get there in time!

Also a quick welcome to anyone coming through to us from 3Dvia. Somehow my work has ended up on the homepage so that makes this post long over due for some of you.

Anyway here goes:

Earthware Tower

This video demonstrates the Earthware tower which allows the user to view the inside as well as the outside of a building in Google Earth. This is the first product aimed at developers of large residential buildings with complicated features. The video outlines the main selling points and a few new features of this style of 3D model. Below is the link to download the Google Earth file so that you can have a play yourself!

Download Earthware Tower for Google Earth

Earthware Superstore

As with all these videos please excuse all the rubbish music. If it were up to me it would be something a little be more cool and a lot less cliché but we don’t want to have to pay royalties so my choice was limited!

Anyway this video shows Earthware superstore a fictional out of town shopping centre or depot style building. This to has a simple interior to show the scope of what is becoming possible with Google Earth and will hopefully be possible with virtual earth very soon.

If your interested in commercial property please check out www.novaloca.com which has a working example of Earthware’s advanced mapping and where hopefully 3D buildings will become a common place feature of the search once Microsoft has developed their tool kit a bit further.

Download Earthware Superstore for Google Earth

As usual we would love your feedback on these items using the comments below, or if you have any business propositions then please contact us.

Cheers

Chris Jackson
Multimedia Developer

Adobe have recently released Acrobat 3D Version 8. This new version of Acrobat gives the user the opportunity to embed a variety of different media types into a PDF document which can then be read by anyone with the free adobe reader software.

Here at Earthware we have jumped at the chance to embed some of our 3D models into this new medium and see what it is capable of. to do this I have taken a fictional building and created a property brochure page around it.

Acrobat has the ability to capture CAD files simply by opening your 3D file in the program it was made in and using the print screen button to capture it while the 3D feature in acrobat is running in the background.

To embed directly into an existing PDF is just as easy.

All you need to do is choose the 3d tool in the tools menu and then draw a marquee in the place you want your model to appear.

Once this is done a capture options menu appears with basic field parameters for the import. After selecting your options you are required to go to your 3D package, load your model and press print screen.

Once print screen has been completed go back to acrobat, the OK button at the bottom of the capture tab will be activated and you press ok.

The model will load in and then be active within the marquee you placed earlier. note that you will need to select the hand tool to activate the 3D navigation panel

Download our prototype and have a go with the 3D window, you will need the latest version of the free adobe acrobat reader. It allows full navigation of the model with the mouse. to activate the tool panel click within the 3D viewer. Also note that acrobat does not show all the textures at the same time, presumably to minimize memory usage although I am working on finding a fix for this

If you need adobe acrobat then click here

To download our prototype click here

For a while we have toyed with the idea of interior modelling in Sketchup for Google earth but with residential models it is impossible to navigate inside them effectively with the tools available. A larger commercial space gives more room to navigate in so we have developed a prototype with a basic interior space to test out the concept.

With some careful mouse movement it will be possible to get inside and view the interior of the building. If you have the advantage of a 3D mouse then performing a fly through will be easy. To aid things a little  there are some place marks in the tour folder which will hopefully guide you through several view points in and around the model providing they work correctly.

Click the link to download the Google earth file

Earthware Commercial Demo

feel free to leave your comments and let us know what you think

First I should introduce myself as I have not Blogged on here before. My name is Chris and I am the Multi Media Developer here at Earthware. I have taken a few hours to go over what’s now on offer in  the new 3D modeller for virtual earth and how it compares with my experiences using Sketch Up.

My general impression of 3Dvia for virtual earth is a positive one although it is very much a work in progress at this time, although having said that for the first available version it is a powerful tool in the making and could soon rival sketchup if enough development is put into it.

Good Stuff:

• Drawing boxes and lines usually gives you an accurate distance and angle for the length and/or trajectory of your construction
• Interface is simple and colourful so novice users find it easy to get around
• Many of the useful line and surface indicators are present that are seen in sketchup. for example 3Dvia gives clear indication when you are in line with other objects or shapes as guides appear to help you
• The manipulate tool is very effective and gives you a lot of control of specific points on an object as well as the object as a whole. it has a very visual adjustment interface giving clear colour coded handles  for the different types of adjustment

Bad stuff

• Internet explorer seem to be unable to run virtual earth 3D on my machine so I have had to load it in Firefox instead
• Although great for a novice the interface is frustrating because of the lack of specified tools and presets making complex models harder to create as well as standard program operation impossible. this makes the package feel like a cheap freebie rather than a fully function program. I would hope that the developers can make this a standalone program like sketchup as I feel this will be highly beneficial to its development
• No file and option menu is present making the publishing of models and screen grabs the only useful thing you can get out of this package
• No ability to save a file on to your own PC
• Copy and pasting components on larger models like windows on a building fails to create editable shapes that are part of the larger mesh
• Not all parts of a model are similarly editable as often their handles are locked out and it is not always clear why.

To summarize I would give this first version a 6 out of 10. I think its a great little program but has a long way to go before it is as powerful as sketchup and can boast as many features. I can’t imagine it will be long before it presents a very tempting alternative. It does seem Microsoft are targeting the novice user which is an interesting decision.

Here’s what I accomplished with an hour of learning and play.

UPDATE: Earthware’s Vscapes product now offers 3d Building developments for our clients in Virtual Earth and Google Earth. For more details see our Vscapes virtual landscapes page for details and client stories.

As promised we have put together a quick video tutorial for creating your first building in Virtual Earth 6. To get started building for yourself you will need to install the new virtual earth 3d plugin and the 3d authoring tool. Both of these are installed by visiting http://local.live.com and clicking on the 3d mode button to install the plugin, and click the "collections | add 3d model" menu to install the 3d authoring tool.

Once you have both installed you are ready to start, zoom the 3d map on http://local.live.com to the location of your building and click "collections | add 3d model". This will open the 3d tool and import the aerial imagery from your chosen location.

Enough talking here is the video tutorial.

We will be working on some further tutorial covering more advanced features once we have had more of a play with the new functionality.

UPDATE: Thanks to Simon @ Microsoft for pointing out that if you click the middle mouse button on your model you can set the pivot point. This improves the navigation drastically, but as soon as you pan or zoom you need to re-center again, would be extra nice if it actually stated fixed to the model.

UPDATE: Earthware’s Vscapes product now offers 3d Building developments for our clients in Virtual Earth / 3dVia and Google Earth. For more details see our Vscapes virtual landscapes page for details and client stories.

We have spent the morning playing with the new Virtual Earth modeling tool, see our tutorial for some examples. Having used Google Sketchup extensively for 3d models in Google Earth we have a good idea of what is required to quickly and effectively create property models.

The interface

The interface is very clean and simple and has most of the tools we would expect from a basic 3d modeling program. It is very easy to create basic shapes and modify them into more complex models. Rotating and resizing models is done very simply as well. The texturing interface is also a pleasure to use making fitting textures to models a breeze.

Navigating your model

Navigating around the 3d space however is far from perfect. There does not seem to be a way to center the rotation of a model around the center point of the model, so simple operations like rotating the view around the model are very clunky. Also there is not support for different viewpoints which are often very handy when modeling. There are a few mouse shortcuts to help navigate like middle mouse button to pan, mouse wheel to zoom and middle mouse button and left mouse button together to rotate. These shortcuts make it a bit simpler to move around but this could be much improved.

Integration into Virtual Earth

The integration into http://local.live.com/ is seemless and very simple. Once in a collection in http://local.live.com/ you can add descriptions, more details urls and photos to each model. You can also add basic 3d tours as described below. Right now of course you can only get models into local.live.com not into your own map mashups but there is promise from the development team that this is coming soon, hopefully with the V6 api release.

To see how models work in local.live.com see our sample collection.

Video / 3d Tours

If you hover over a model in your local.live.com collection and choose "edit properties" you will see a box with a "3d tour" tab appear. This lets you add a basic tour to the model with a start position and angle to spin around during the animation. It would be nice to see a more advanced multi stage tour that could include multiple models.

If you then click on the actions menu in the collections box you will see a "tour in 3d" option, this allows you to playback the animations you have added to models in your collection. There are simple controls the playback the tour and a red record button to output the tour to video! Below is an example tour video.

Summary

Overall this is a great step for Virtual Earth, having a very simple to use 3d editor is the first step to getting user created 3d content into Virtual Earth. It will take a few versions before these tools can start to rival the Google Earth / Google Sketchup combination but for a first release this is really great.

Of course the biggest issues is that currently you cannot import you own existing models, everything has to be created from scratch. This is a major issue for us at Earthware so we will be investing some time experimenting to see if there is any "unofficial" way to do this.