Hi. I’ve been using SketchUp for years, but never really come to terms with the Photo matching function. I guess it would be really useful to me, but I’ve messed with it from time to time without ever getting very far. Is there a good tutorial somewhere?
What would be good, would be to take a photo of the outside of an existing house, check one or two dimensions, and using Photo match, to be able to build a model of the house, or at least the part visible in the photograph.
Or is that not possible?
thanks in advance - Paul
Happy New Year Paul. You might start here:
https://help.sketchup.com/en/sketchup/matching-photo-model-or-model-photo
In a nutshell, for Match Photo to be usable you need an unmodified image with horizontals that run off to two vanishing points. By “unmodified” I mean uncropped and with no perspective correction applied. Basically, straight from the camera.
Here’s an an example showing my setup for a Match Photo image.
As for setting the size, you can drag vertically up or down the blue axis to get some known dimension. I normally trace the largest known dimension I can find and then use the Tape Measure tool to resize everything to the correct dimensions.
@RTCool is an expert on Match Photo and can probably give you more guidance.
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Great! - thanks Dave, I’ll look into this and see how i get on.
In your example setup, did you model the crates elsewhere and then bring them in, as an addition to the photo?
What I’d like to do is draw over the photo, so that when I’ve finished, I can delete the phot and be left with a model of the building… or am i being ambitious?
and Happy New year to you to!
Paul
You’re quite welcome.
In that model I created the model after setting up the Match Photo image because I needed the building for dimension references. I was designing those planters from scratch (helping a friend’s son with his Eagle Scout project) but you can import a model into the file with the Match Photo image in it if you want. You could also add a Match Photo image to an existing model although that’s usually a little more involved than I want.
Not too ambitious at all. I traced the building and projected the image as a texture onto the geometry. (I used one of the shipped shingle textures for the roof.) This kind of thing would be required in order to be able to seethe model from other positions.
Keep in mind that you can only see the Match Photo image from one camera position which is set up in the automatically created scene.
You can edit the style to show or hide the image.
There are a couple of little niggly things to remember about starting from a Match Photo image. The scene that is created by Match Photo hasmost of the properties to save turned off.
That will carry over for additional scenes unless you manually correct it.
You can edit the visibility of the Match Photo image in the Modeling settings for the style. If you make changes remember to update the style by clicking on the thumbnail at the top left of the Styles panel.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwfr3dZAOvM - Aaron uses photomatch in this video (and many others) at the 6:30 min. mark.
if you have any doubts about your photo, just share it here. When some photos are obviously bad for photomatch, I’ve had a couple that I didn’t expect to work, and a few more that I thought would be fine but weren’t.
“Nearly there, nearly there!”
…Shrunken Head in the Night Bus (voiced by Lenny Henry)
…Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
It just so happens I’ve been editing a basic one this past week, and I’m almost done. I just need to record a little intro for it. Then, I need to record my 3D Basecamp session … I’m all set up to do that too.
Yes, I do that for quick an dirty context houses. (some examples in this post and this post.). You want to get the biggest, overall dimensions possible rather than scaling the whole building based on some small part like one brick. (That’s the difference between interpolation vs. extrapolation to put words on it.). One thing I’ve done is use tax cards to get very rough dimensions without having to set foot on the property. It’s better if you can measure it yourself. (My most recent equipment in this post.)
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