How to I increase the area limit for Geo Location? For example if I want all of New York City I need to add location multiple times and manually merge the geometries together and it’s really a pain to have to join the edge together, is there a way to increase the area limit for Geo Location?
Will Placemaker solve my problem? Does anyone have experience will Placemaker?
There is an Add More Imagery… option. You would geo locate to anywhere in NYC, then use the add more imagery option to grab the next area. You will see warnings about how you’re a long way from the previous grab, and how it might not line up well, but in a quick test it seems ok to me. Is there a reason you need to merge the geometries?
Placemaker does a lot more than just give you tiles, and may be suitable for what you’re doing, especially if you want to get roads, pathways, water, and many other things. I haven’t used it for a while, so I’m not sure of the cost to get so many tiles.
BTW, I’m in 11201 as I type this.
The add more imagery option will give you more geo but it does not stitch the new geo with the old geo, further more as you get further and further away it becomes hard to pin point where you left off.
The images align.
But the terrain geometry does not.
Creating a functional terrain from multiple imports is no small task.
Functional terrain meaning a single Surface entity with no holes, overhangs, underhangs, or caves.
Exactly.
Seems to me one solution would be to Geolocate one model zoomed right in, then another zoomed out and combine the two. You should be able to select the zoomed in tile and paint it on the zoomed out terrain in one go. The terrain zoomed out may be less detailed, but it should be continuous.
I haven’t tried it, just guessing.
That is a very interesting approach, thank you so much I will surely try it out!
That is a wonderful plugin, a great alternative to Placemaker, thank you so much I think I will try it out 
An option I’ve used successfully in the past is to use a height map with the extension ‘Bitmap to Mesh’. There’s some room for error as you have to have a reference for the scale, both along X,Y and Z planes. it also makes for a large file depending on how detailed you want your mesh to be. Manhattan is 7 miles across N to S so that’s pretty large.
Those are people down there in pink for reference both to model size and mesh detail.
Lastly, you can drape whatever image you want on top, but again, since it’s such a large area, you’ll get pixalated pretty quick because of SketchUp’s natural image resolution size…hence the tiling.
SU model - https://www.dropbox.com/s/6zghadqpbared81/NYC-Heighmapper.skp.zip?dl=0
That is a very creative way to do it! Thank you
