Rivers Campus in Full 3D

A couple of Rivers Seniors have built Rivers in 3D. Try as I might, I could not get my copy of Google SketchUp to render a proper .kmz file for Google Earth, but this is a big, detailed model:





They added all kinds of landscaping details (signs, benches, garbage cans, etc) and could not add colors and textures without slowing the animations to a crawl. But this was a tremendously fun thing to watch happen.

Rivers Updated in Google Earth

This had to have happened in just the last couple of weeks -- Google has updated the satellite maps for the The Rivers School campus, and it now includes the Athletics Center:



We're pretty sure this is a Saturday in Spring 2005 since the baseball field is not yet been moved beind behind Maintenance. It looks like the site has shifted a bit under my model (see the roof edges sticking out from under the walls?), so I'll have to try to snap-shot and export the model again, see if I can get it to line up better.

It's interesting that there was about two years from the time of the satellite photo to its incorporation into Google Earth.

Rivers School on Google Earth

Some of the kids at school asked about Google Sketchup -- so I finally made the time to build a quickie model and export it to Google Earth to see what it's look like.

First, I took a site plan and scanned it into a JPEG file. It's clean enough to see the building footprints. I had to guestimate the scale by drawing a line and scaling the line to a known measurement -- but not too tough:


Next, I found the Rivers School on Google Earth and exported a snapshot of that to Sketchup -- this is just a simple button click in Sketchup. It pulls in both a snapshot and the "terrain" (topography). It's kinda cool the way the shadows line up on the Google Earth image:


I could then match up the scanned site plan to the Google Earth snapshot quite easily -- boy things look so good when they're in Google Earth:


The model is very "blocky"; I guessed on all the vertical dimensions. This is more of a proof of concept. The Sketchup .kmz file for the Rivers Site is here.

Test Thing

Test Thing

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The Rivers School