From large cities like New York and Tokyo, to small towns like Madison, NJ and Dursley, England, a growing number of places around the world have become explorable in 3D with Google Earth. Google is working towards an ambitious goal – to display 3D models of all the world's buildings in Google Earth – and in order to accomplish this, keep the buildings up to date, and make them relevant, the modeling process has to be as open and inclusive as possible.

With that, Google has launched, Google Building Maker, a new way to create geo-located 3D models of buildings for Google Earth. Building Maker is a tool designed to make it possible for anyone with a web-browser to make high quality, photo-textured 3D models. In many ways, Building Maker is like a very large, and very smart, collection of building blocks – if a user can assemble the blocks to match the shape of a favorite building, the user will be able to use the tool.

First, open a browser and go to Building Maker; make sure the latest version of Google Earth has been installed and that the browser supports the Google Earth plug-in. Next, choose a building from one of the fifty cities and towns where modeling is currently possible. Even if a building that has already been modelled is chosen, the user can use Building Maker to produce a higher quality model that could replace the current one in Google Earth. Building Maker provides images taken from a variety of different aerial angles; just select the 'smart blocks' that are the best fit and match the blocks to the images. Once the blocks to the objects in the imagery are matched, Building Maker will generate a photo-textured 3D model of your building for Google Earth. If the model looks good, the user can save it online in the Google 3D Warehouse and have it reviewed for use in Google Earth, where, if approved, it would appear in the 3D Buildings layer with a credit given to its creator.

Building Maker is the latest example of efforts to provide users with the tools to contribute to the world's most comprehensive 3D atlas. In addition to Building Maker, Google recently released Google SketchUp 7.1 with Street View photo textures and made some improvements to 3D Warehouse pipeline.

Give Building Maker a try here. To use Building Maker, a browser that supports the Google Earth plug-in must be installed.


Want to see what 24 hours of creative awesomeness look like? Click here.



This news message is supported by The Creative Finder, an online platform for photographers, illustrators, designers, and art directors to promote their portfolios towards new clients and collaborators. Creatives who wish to sign up for an account can save 10% off annual fees with promo code 'designtaxi'.