As a member of the Nootka Green our School committee, I wanted to contribute by creating a 3D model of our school which we could then easily add trees, shrubs and other landscape details to, as a way of visualizing a variety of landscaping scenarios without heavy investment. A few things I have learned so far during the project for those looking for some tips:
- Pick the lowest elevation point on school grounds to model from. Otherwise (at least for sketchUp newbies like me) in working with model objects or superimposing photos you may often find yourself staring very awkwardly at or under the ground (pavement) level. This assumes you have a flat pavement/landscape foundation. I haven't attempted a sloped landscape, though my school grounds do slope by a few feet per hundred.
- It's a really neat feature to be able to start modeling with a Google satellite ground plan. Sketchup records a very accurate scale calculation right off the bat. However, most satellite images are tricky to use for nailing down the floor plan on at least a north-south if not east-west (or both) axis. From an image of a low-lying building it may look like the satellite took the image from directly above, and its only the angle of the sun casting shadows. In my case, though this wasn't readily apparent, the satellite was at least 15% off vertical. This in conjunction with the sun being at about 50% off vertical, lead to north-facing roof-lines looking like the boundary of the building when in fact the wall abutments were actually a few feet more southerly. South-facing roofline was also a few feet off, but since the roofline blurred with wall edge I'd basically marked the start of the walls in the right place there.
- The Sketchup method of aligning photographs to the model is tricky. If I'm not mistaken the engineers should (and probably will) rewrite this so that you can push each corner of your photograph onto the wall (or mid-air) spot that it should line up with (the software would maintain the plane of the photo as you do this. Currently you have to toy with very tricky parallax line-to-infinity controls to manoeuvre the photo.