Can't zoom out enough when joining multiple 3d terrain areas

Technical Problems SketchUp
1

I am trying to use add location to make 3d terrain in sketchup 24.
It is much improved but when creating multiple areas, though they click together well, the system will not let me zoom out enough to gather all I need in one go. Why is this?
It would also be a great improvement if the terrain areas could have an option of being selectable as just squares (not shapes that can be pulled into any 4 sided shape), and, with texture that matches i.e. in powers of 2 instead of all sorts of random shapes.

2

It’s likely that it costs money to access the dataset. So they set limits to allow you to import larger areas…but not unlimited necessarily. You can use this alternative ‘Heightmap’ method that doesn’t have a limit to how big an area you can import in one go. The tradeoff is that you have to then replace the aerial image if you want that to show as well. And if you do the aerial as one large image, compared to multiple tiled imports, then you lose resolution since SU has a max texture size it can display. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSfjSsF4_QA

3

Hi Eric

That was useful for getting an area and improving its texture quality but my problem is it simply wont let me zoom out and select a large enough area (40km x 25km) so I will have to create multiple areas

and try to manually connect them together in my modelling tool.

Try setting location, zoom a long way out, slect continue (it now zooms right back in again) and wont zoom out again enough and shows the wrong height above ground.

(To me, I think the selection box should be able to be set as fully square when required, with texture aspect to match).

Then, all the texture patterns (even if merged in each area) are not legal sizes in the real-time systems I am working on, i.e. 4096 x 4096, 2048 x 2048 etc so I almost have to do all of that again as well, making this a fairly unusable tool.

Any suggestions welcome?

Martin

4

I don’t know what you are trying to achieve, but I wonder if SketchUp is the right tool for it. SketchUp’s modelling engine is geared towards architectural projects, and things larger than, say, about a kilometer start to show problems like display clipping, display artifacts and glitches in the inferencing system. I understand that things like regional planning are usually managed via some kind of GIS-based systems.

2 Likes
5

Hi Anssi

I used to use sketchup 2022 successfully but that won’t work anymore as it wont let me select ‘build 3d terrain’ any more?

I had hoped 2024 would just be a step forward and, it was looking good but seems it has too many limitations . Such is life.

My work is for creating limited area 3d terrains for use in simulation.

Martin

6

Maybe you can scale your model by a factor of 0.1 or even 0.01 to bring the values in a more reasonable range.

7

im not sure i understand that. its a realworld area and sketchup always zooms in without me wanting it to.

8

I don’t know if SU can do that with a 40 km x 25 km area but, after you have imported it, can you select it and use the Scale tool?

9

Sorry but I’m unsure about the scaling option. All,I know is, that if you select location, geolocate, zoom right out then select a box it zooms in and wont ever go out again, so you can never select the full area

you want even with multiple imports, as they just go to the edge of the view and wont move further.

Terrain was the only reason I got sketchup so this is a tad frustrating but, I appreciate your help.

Martin

10

…

SketchUp 2024 comes “out of the box” with version 1.5.5 of the Add Location extension.

But there is a newer version 1.7.3 in the Extension Warehouse. Have you updated to this newest version?

Also, your forum profile stills lists 2022 as your SketchUp version.