Citizen Will

Making some progress on a GoogleEarth visualization of downtown.

Here’s some data if you want to either visualize Chapel Hill within GoogleEarth or want to start fresh with a re-import. Small caveat on the GoogleEarth import – don’t turn on the terrain as I still need to tweak the elevations to get the right output.

If anyone manages to adjust the terrain before Sunday, please consider routing the changes back my way….

Tools:

• GoogleEarth
• Google Sketchpad (to create the 3D models)

Data:

• Chapel Hill GE KMZ Model File
• AutoCad 3D Model [ZIP] (provided by CH Planning – thanks Gordon)
• 3dStudio [ZIP]

Hope to have Granville Towers and RAM’s Lot 5 proposal by Sunday. And, with any luck, a decent flyby to demonstrate the visual impact of the 104′ leviathan.

This is still very raw, but I thought I’d put out this demo to stir some thought within the community. Visualization tools like GoogleEarth (GE) can help remove some of the difficulty in assessing the visual impact of new development.

Our town’s planning department has the raw data needed to create a GoogleEarth representation of our town which I plan to massage and then release into the public domain for other citizens to elaborate on.

Why GoogleEarth?

While GE is a proprietary tool, the datasets it uses are exportable. So, Google owns the tool, not the data.

Our planning department should be creating GE or NASA Wind World representations of Chapel Hill as a matter of course – it would help both them and the community create a common visual-based framework for development discussions.

The free and OSS tools used:

• GoogleEarth
• Google Sketchpad (to create the 3D models)
• Cam Studio (to produce the low quality movie)

GE has a movie making module but that requires an upgrade to GE Pro at $400 per year (not quite ready for that…)

One of my readers was slightly confused about whether the fly-by of Hillsborough425 documented in my post Hillsborough425: Google Earth Fly-By, Alpha Quality was live or not.

Yes it is!

If you have the proper version of GoogleEarth installed ( GoogleEarth v4.0291.beta ), then opening this link will crank up the application and display the maps.

Alternatively, you can download the KMZ file and open it in GoogleEarth.

In either case, once the fly-over/fly-by is open, you can play around with the map views by toggling Hillsborough425: Existing Town House, Hillsborough425ConceptPlanSept17th and Hillsborough425 GoogleEarth under GoogleEarth’s Hillsborough425 folder.

You can also start with a long view oriented from the North of the site by clicking on North Entrance Chapel Hill.

Any questions? Please post a comment, I’ll be happy to help.