Map your house in 3D

Written by Roshi

My house in Koramangala was one of the first houses in our area to be marked on Google Earth! At that time I hadn't imagined that I could have my house on the map in 3D! Well, I am waiting for Google Earth to extend the service to India also. I found the time to check out the 3D feature while returning from Indore after Diwali holidays. My flight got delayed for 4 hours and I decided to check it out on my Samsung NC20. Try this out!

When Google Earth was launched a few years back, we had so much of fun with it. I used it for the first time to check the aerial view of my house and showing it off to friends in college. Later, we started using it regularly to locate the addresses of contacts. Google 3D Building Maker is an amusing tool, quite easy to understand and user friendly. It is a crowd sourcing tool where each person will contribute the 3D model of his house or office space to add to Google Earth’s collection. In turn, a virtual world is created on the Google Earth with the 3D model of each building.

It is a 3D modeling tool to create your own building in 3D on Google Earth. As we know the shape, contours, and texture of our buildings better than the others, Google knows that no one can do the job better. However, don’t confuse it with Google SketchUp, which is used to create 3D models for anything. It uses the interface of Google SketchUp to create 3D building models and 3D warehouse to store your buildings before Google reviews your model to include it on Google Earth. You should have Google Earth 3D plug-in installed on your system to use this 3D modeling tool apart from a browser and a Google Id to save your buildings.

Get started with Google’s 3D Building Maker from here. Choose your language and click the ‘Try Building Maker’ button. You will now enter the interface of Google Building Maker, which has an editor and a viewer section. You can edit your 3D models in the editor and analyze them on Google Earth in viewer.

The first step for 3D modeling will be choosing your city on Google Earth. Google has launched 3D Building Maker with the directory of 50 cities and has plans to add more. You can get the list of available cities from a drop down menu at the top right or else can zoom into Google Map for your area in the city and drag the red placemark there.

When you zoom into cities, you can view the aerial imagery of buildings. Once you have selected location, you can view the eight aerial angles to align your building properly. Select the building, choose the angle and then align it using 3D shapes such as boxes, prisms, pyramids. Building maker is capable of doing photo texturing on its own, but you need to drag the corners of shapes to fit the building properly. Then repeat the proper alignment for all the eight views to design your building accurately.

At any time, you can analyze the appearance of the building in the viewer and do the changes accordingly. Once you are done with painting the 3D model of your building, you can save it. When saved, it will be stored in the 3D warehouse of Google Earth, to be reviewed by Google. If the model is good, Google will include it in Google Earth within a week.

It is an interesting concept; you can bring your building to life too!

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