I have you to thank for learning this critical fact here on the forums. Once I got that, that set me on the path to figure out the rest.
What you can rely on is this: If you type in an angle for the vertical angle of view, you get exactly what you asked, no problem. For example, if you type 37.8° with the Zoom tool, you get the view of a 35mm lens. You can resize the window and the vertical part of the image holds while the horizontal part floats showing you either more or (in the case of the iPad) less of the horizontal field of view depending on the proportions of the window (iPads are generally 4:3 so it’s cut off).
If you type in a focal length, like 35mm, what SketchUp does is convert that to an angle of view and then enters that for you for the value. The bug is this: if you type 35mm, what SU comes up with is 54.4° which is the correct value for the horizontal angle of view, but that’s not what SU actually uses; it uses the vertical one. As a result, what SU reports for a focal length on horizontal images is always off by a factor of 1.5x because the aspect ratio of 35mm pictures is 3:2. The exception is a vertical image because the wider “horizontal” angle of view coincides with SU’s vertical angle of view.
During the party at 3D Basecamp, I caught @thomthom’s ear, and he seemed to be aware of this already. He pointed out if you use his Safe Frames plugin, then it will report the correct focal length.
This may not look like much, but this is a huge milestone. After nearly 30 years of using a Mac laptop and PowerCADD on site to measure and draw existing conditions, this is my first time using only SketchUp for iPad and an Apple pencil to do an entire house. Ok, late in the day, the battery was dying and I resorted to pencil and paper for homework to go along with the photos for Match Photo on desktop, but it all worked out.
Tools of the trade: Nikon Z6, 14-30 mm, Leica Disto, baby tape measure, iPad and Apple Pencil with SketchUp for iPad, Bienfang Parchment 100 pad and pencil.
Kind of, but not exactly. It’s Long Island Sound which opens into the Atlantic, but here, Long Island is just barely visible on the horizon when you’re at ground level. Once you get up a story or two in height, you can see Long Island more clearly. This is about the widest point of the sound.
This was the chance to try something I’ve thought about for a while: When MatchPhoto fails because it’s too close to a one point perspective, this used a combination of knowledge of the camera and SU’s ins and outs of focal length plus a watermark and a Spacemouse to trial and error match the view.
It’s awesome.
I’d live there.
I do like the viewshaft through the side yard, but I loved how the garage was open!
Do you not use Photoshop to correct the image? Or do you find match photo is better?
I seldom use match photo but I do use the watermark method to adjust the model. Forensic modelling is pretty interesting to get in to from time to time.
I do the vast majority of my photographic post processing in Lightroom (rather than Photoshop) and do often use “perspective correction” tools there, but not in this case. This is what I call poor man’s perspective correction. Traditionally it has always been done at capture with a shift lens, especially with a 4x5 view camera with a bellows. There are some expensive tilt-shift lenses for modern cameras, so achieving the same results with ordinary lenses is why I call it poor man’s perspective correction. As long as the camera is level (the picture plane is vertical), vertical lines won’t converge and the horizon line is dead center vertically. The problem is the subject wants to be framed looking up, so you naturally want to tilt the camera up. Keep the camera level and zoom wider till everything fits, and then crop asymmetrically afterwords. That gets the perspective corrected at capture, but cost you in terms of total image resolution. You can see the horizon vertically centered in the uncropped picture with the SU model, but not vertically centered in the final image after cropping.
I do Match Photo all the time, especially for existing condition survey, (which is why it was the topic of my presentation at 3D Basecamp last year.) I did one recently where I never measured any of the doors and windows, but I could measure them later in SketchUp with Match Photo with pretty good results.
I finally got permission to show this project publicly so I could use it as a case study for my talk on plugins and extensions last week. This is a project I did for hire for fellow Centerbrook alum, Chris Arelt, Nautilus Architects. He sent me 2D AutoCAD drawings, and I did the rest.
Three extensions played important rolls: 1) Flextools helped insert so many windows in a hurry, 2) Placemaker provided very large context aerial photography and terrain beyond the property’s A-2 survey, and 3) V-Ray rendered the house in context with a lot of randomized plants.
Some recent work regrouping and reorganizing lately: I invested time in making a local library of window components for a current project that are prepped for FlexTools to insert in a double component wall assembly (so 4 surfaces to cut):
News Update: The beach house you’ve seen a bunch of in this thread is the subject of an article in Connecticut Magazine - June 2024 issue. The online version is posted here on CT Insider:
In my case it’s an RGPD thing, many US news websites decided their target was US-based so they didn’t need to be transparent about data use and obey the EU.
And many won’t bother explain, they’ll just tell you it’s not available in your region.
