I created a terrain map using 1/3 arc-second data from the US Geological Survey … the vertical resolution is accurate to 1m which doesn’t give a lot of elevation to your model. The mesh can be scaled to fit your geometry … adjust the vertical scale to suit your needs.
[Disclaimer: The applied photo-texture is a screen capture from Google Earth and copyright(s) may be applicable]
Cool.
Honestly I have no idea what an arc-second is, but I’m not about to let that stop me.
Thanks.
More detailing done…
Power pole complete with guy wire, streetlight that is actually different from the bridge lights, and of course a sign advising people leaving the rest stop not to park on the bridge…
Because, y’know, people like to park on bridges…
Basic GPS … if the earth is essentially a sphere, any location on the surface can be specified by its east/west angle (longitude) and its north/south angle (latitude) and its height above some datum (altitude). While I personally prefer decimal notation, the traditional longitudes and latitudes use degrees, minutes, and seconds (e.g., 35° 31’ 39.921"). Since there are 3600 seconds in a degree, 1/3 arc-second would be 1/10,800th of degree in terms of latitude and longitude (or about 33.67 feet / 10.26 meters). This corresponds to the grid spacing in the terrain map.
nods dumbly
Still have no clue whatsoever on how to apply that to my model. But fear not! I will figure this out. Somehow.
Click on the 3D Warehouse logo in my post and download it and import it into your model. You will need to move and scale it to fit.
Aha! I downloaded it.
Thanks very much, I’ll get to work on it as soon as my brain recovers from trying to make street signs.
Aw man…
You’d laugh at me.
I am so not able to get it to do what I want.
I try to smoove it and it just…hangs my computer and then everything turns bright yellow.
I’m hopeless!
Tonight I added in most of the road signage on either side of the bridge.
I’ll be shortly working on the 1994 sign dedicating the bridge to the late Mr Bernt Gilbertson.
check the layers of the SKP model, guessing you have both the snap shot and terrain both on. The elevation is so low you are seeing artifacts of z fighting, turn off the terrain layer
The “oh my god help me” was meant as a lighthearted exclamation…
I more or less gave up temporarily as I clearly don’t yet have the concepts down.
But learning slowly!
I have been lurking in this topic for a while now and just wanted to say, don’t give up. You are actually learning very fast. You are doing a great job on your model. Doing a highly detailed project like this and learning how to use SketchUp at the same time is not an easy thing to do. I look forward to seeing more of your progress!
Well thank you.
I do wish I had paid a bit more attention in math class back in the day, as my concept of geometry is somewhat shaky…
Like, when I was putting the road signs on and drawing out the guide points, I would fall into the habit of simply going from line to face and typing in, say, 2 inches, and then when it came times to fill them in it would fill the entire face of the sign instead of the shape. Many “WHAT THE %^&%$!?” moments were had, until I finally figured out to go line to LINE and then type in the values…
Many subtle nuances that aren’t obvious to this that I’m slowly learning and going “oooooohhhhhh that’s sneaky”.
A testament to how powerful SketchUp is, I guess.
Well…
Doing these street signs has caused my model to become more sluggish for some reason.
I uploaded it to my Google Drive if anyone is curious to see what it looks like.
So I have a question for the gurus…
My streetsigns, I made some metal posts for them that are 10’ tall and 1 1/4" square, and they have a bunch of 3/8" holes in them spaced 3/4" apart centre to centre on all 4 sides.
I’ve placed about 12 of these, and it occurs to me that that is a ton of 3/8" circles in my model.
Could these be the reason my model has suddenly quintupled in disk space and why my computer is choking on it?
Yes, that is a huge amount of geometry. I imagine you have used the default 24 sided circle, multiply those segments by the number of holes you have created…
That sort of thing is better done as a texture, as in paint your poles with a material that looks like it has holes in the appropriate place.
Aha.
Silly me.
I’m gonna delete those holes and either just live with them being solid square bars or, if I feel adventurous, I’ll experiment with that texture thingy.
Thank you.
I’ve managed to delete all 100,000 or so holes I made.
It’s nice to not have to wait 7 seconds between releasing the mouse button and waiting for the computer to decide to acknowledge my commands…
I made the moose’s head too small, but oh well.
This is frustrating.
