So I’m in love with the city of Chicago and wanted to envision my own version of the city perhaps in the year 2050 or something so I thought it would be neat to download an already existing model of the city and begin to edit it in Sketchup. I began to search the web for affordable but quality 3D models of the Chicago skyline. What I found was disappointing.
Needless to say they’re all bookoo bucks! Definitely not within my price range. Outrageous prices of $500+ , $600+, $1,000, and the craziest ones going for $50k. You know it’s going to be expensive you have to request a quote and they never get back to you.
I found some sites that offered it for free such as OpenStreetMap and GML open source data but the models of the buildings have such poor quality of detail you can hardly tell a round building from a square one. Literally!
So then I began to look for alternatives. I began to try to see if I could download or export the data from Google Earth. I was able to successfully download a textured 3D version of it from Google Earth but when I loaded it into Sketchup, it helplessly crashed.
Common it’s 2021. Isn’t there a way to download a 3D model of a city and have it run in Sketchup for cheap if not free? There’s gotta be a way… Cities with tall buildings are on display for all to see. I just need to figure out how to download that data.
I’ve found a decent model that I’m willing to pay for if there’s no other options for $99 . But I don’t want to purchase it only to have Sketchup lag to the point where it becomes completely unresponsive and editing the model is useless. I’m using a 2016 MacBook Pro with a 3.1 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5 processor.
Does anybody know of a way to download a 3D city to be edited in Sketchup on a 3.1GHZ MacBook? And of course a decent price range?
I want it to be detailed to a point where it looks good, but not so detailed that my computer crashes. And I want it to be cheap and preferably free.