It’s been over four years since I joined the original 3d warehouse forum as a modeler, but I’ve just signed into this group today. And it was a year ago today that 3d warehouse stopped accepting any new buildings for Google Earth’s 3d layer.
Last September, I was in a furious rush to finish as many works-in-progress in my model bucket list as possible before the impending shutdown. Since then, my activity in both creating models on Sketchup and posting on the forum has been far and few between.
I remember patiently waiting months for that last 3d push to happen, which it finally did in February 2014. That same month, however, saw an extreme makeover of the website by Trimble that no one on the outside saw coming, much less welcomed. I’ve practically given up on making any further modification or editing of my models & collections in my account since then.
I do check into Google Earth on occasion, and all of my 3d-layer models (194 out of 292) are still there. It was an interesting venture, using Sketchup and Building Maker, to produce something like this.
If anyone has any reminiscing of the good old days of modeling, feel free to comment.
Yeah, a tragic shame. It is incomprehensible to me, how anyone can decide to abort something so unique, engaging and with a serious amount of time invested into it. Even though it was always going to be superseded by technology, the user created 3D buildings offered a human interpretation of our world and what ‘place’ means to us all, individually and as a community. I thought this format was going to eventually change the face of Local Planning Systems, as the ultimate, unified resource for site analysis and communicating proposals, but maybe that idea is way ahead of its time. Probably a good thing too, else we would all be even more dependant on Google.
I have started contributing towards OSM now to get my geo-modelling fix, but its just not the same. I like to think there will eventually be a new open-source platform for visualising geo-located 3D models, but I can only hope. Maybe one day Sketchup will be capable of importing/exporting OSM data, but I don’t know how that would work.
This website has some info about future oppertunities, but its early days - Geomodelling
I can tell you one thing about the February 2014 takeover, Almost a year has passed, AND NOTHING HAS BEEN DONE! This is why big corporations suck. And by the way, I liked the five-star rating system better because It defines “Quality”. ALSO THIS WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE FACEBOOK!
Well, by your equation, and a search engine from a sucky big corporation, the numbers I get today:
Googl mkt cap / Trimb mkt cap = 345.22B / 6.87B, so we’re both 50 times better off now than we were at Google. Sounds about right.
Now as far as the 5 versus no (OK, I tried, the sun is a star, right?) ratings, maybe it would have taken us 5 times as long to move those over instead of likes, and then you’d still be waiting for them.
As for the 3D pipeline, you’ll have to talk to Google about that.
-b
ps - Google did allow us to migrate our sense of humor to Trimble
It’s not just the pipeline shutdown, it’s what made it through is being replaced by the melted auto-generated blobs. I did a dozen or more buildings in Hollywood, which has exuberant buildings on a pedestrian scale. For a while the two layers co-existed; now - gone. Zagreb, Croatia had the same sort of urban fabric, and seemed a safer, out-of-the way place, and so a few Deco memories of a more optimistic and confident time. Melted. Just today I found the Campo de Marte airport, too, now resembles a badly frosted cake.
I never thought it was Art, anymore than making Blenheim Palace out of toothpicks is Art. But it was fun, and I’m sorry to see it replaced by gloop that is still so far from the same quality.
versus no 