Can you please add the ability to add the parcel map (property lines) to the GEO location? Like a layer or something. This would be super helpful!
there are a lot of countries, around 180-ish. some have their data available for free online in a vector format, other as images, some don’t have it available.
I don’t see sketchup coordinating and gathering all that data…
but depending on where you’re from, it can be trivial. where are you from ?
to give you an example, in france I can get dxf files of cadastral plans for free on cadastre.data.gouv.fr
within a few minutes, I can download the sheet that interests me, import it in my SU file and move it to match the satellite photo.
here is an example. topography came from sketchup, it was then adjusted for reality.
I imported the cadastral plan, placed it on top of the satellite view. then I removed the satellite textures to get a clean terrain.
and I draped the lines on the terrain
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I shared a similar process in my 3dbc 2024 session - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCMh0nh1CXw
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This seems like a really complicated way of doing it. Can you please upload a video of just how to download the maps, use that program better while also keeping in mind not everyone is working with cities or in cities. We are the rural areas of MD and DE mostly. It would be much better if sketchup just added this feature straight into sketchup rather than have to use third party software.
Who is the supplier of these parcel maps you want? I have to get them from the county GIS agency and they aren’t all supplied exactly the same way. I expect if a feature was added to SketchUp to do what you propose, managing it would be a nightmare and it would also add a great deal to the cost of SketchUp.
Living in Finland, I have no use for U.S. property lines and I am quite unwilling to pay for the feature.
In our country, just like in France as told by @ateliernab the national survey data is free (unfortunately, not in a ready to use format as in France) but in a GIS format. We have a commercial service available that provides the data directly as SketchUp models.
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The answer was already provided by @ateliernab that A. parcel data availability varies based on municipality and B. (assuming the data was universally available) SketchUp’s 'aint adding new features like this…shout to the heavens as we might here on the Forum.
Start carving out some time to learn how to do it yourself - complicated or not - via third party app (as I showed with QGIS (FREE) or an extension, like Moduler. (PAID):
Either way…Good luck!
I don’t know who the supplier is? You’ll have to forgive my ignorance as I’m just trying to work through this and figure it all out. We do a lot of work in Delaware and Maryland so having parcels for all properties in both states is ideal.
The ‘Supplier’ is the municipality in which you’re working in. This could be at the County or City level. Rarely would a State manage parcel-level data as they’d have to collect, host, update, etc all of that for all of their cities. Take Los Angeles for example…just LA County alone comprises of 88 cities - each city with thousands of parcels each. It’s a lot. Parcels also change so every time there’s a census or survey done, the data gets re-uploaded/organized. All of this costs cities/counties money. That’s why some municipalities do a better job than others making the data available online. Most cities will share their data but may not have it online…you may have to request in person or via contact form for download link that’s not made public.
Example. Looking for Wilmington, DE data, gets me, not to Wilmington but New Castle County - https://apps-nccde.hub.arcgis.com/ From here, I navigate to GIS Maps and find ‘Parcel Boundaries Shapefile’. Click and download that file (299 mb!!) and open it/convert it however you choose best.
Also, one thing to note is that the map in SketchUp uses a single simple lat/long type coordinate system for the whole world. Local maps usually use a locally defined x/y/z coordinate system to store all the map and property data. The world has a myriad of these systems and they are often at their most inaccurate where they should connect to each other because they threat their scope area as a flat surface and the world is roughly an elliptical globe.
Thanks for the help, I just thought it would be an easy adder for sketchup as when you do a geo location in the first step you can see the parcel lines (if you look close you can see gray lines) in the satellite image but then once it’s imported they are not there. So wherever sketchup is getting their data from it appears to already be in that data.
Agreed. But this isn’t SketchUp’s data…it’s Bing/Digital Globes…that SketchUp purchases. I can’t speak to the availability, cost, api integration, etc that would make that accessible to us…So until then (don’t hold your breath), perhaps simply tracing over the aerial image can get you started.