Aligning aerial photograph to Sandbox terrain

SketchUp
1

I’m currently creating a model of a college campus. We have models of all the buildings, but have been unsuccessful in creating a terrain model that aligns to our buildings.

I started with AutoCAD contour lines and turned it into a sandbox, which is now a solid color, but I need to accurately scale this sandbox and align and aerial photograph nearly exactly in order to place our building models in the correct location.

Does anyone have some tips or tricks for accurately aligning this terrain to an aerial photograph?

2

Have you tried using Add Location? One of the layer created in the location group has the terrain information.

3

Here is a classic video on how to drape an image on a terrain model. It was created way back when we only had b&w imagery for our Google Earth import/add location.

You will want to pick up where Mike brings in his own color image to drape on the terrain.

Cheers
CD

4

Thanks so much, I was sort of doing my own version of this already, it is just painstaking work!