Importing Terrain from Google Earth?

[Aerilius]

Terrain or imagery has never been imported from Google Earth (although it is imprecisely said so everywhere). They were using some Google-internal APIs to Google Maps imagery and terrain data.

You can however take any aerial imagery or terrain data and import it into SketchUp. The difficult part is matching the imported imagery to the correct location.

For example in Google Earth, go to preferences and turn off terrain to reduce image distortion, then press R to orient the view vertically and North, then go to File → Export Image…
Then align the image in SketchUp using these two solutions:

Right background size

Adjusting imported map images is easy and accurate with [RotaScale] (Extension | SketchUp Extension Warehouse): Move the imported map so that a first reference point matches with the model (or earlier imported satellite image, evt. marked with a vertical line). Pick a second reference point on the imported image and then click in the model where it would be correctly located.

Projecting image over terrain

This function did never change, so “up-to-date” is relative [SketchUp: Mapping photo textures to curved surfaces]