Warehouse model scale

I don’t often download from the Warehouse because of the many problems associated with models made by others. However, there are times when it is useful. Today, I have tried downloading some car models and a wheelie bin. Some of the cars were toy size. The wheelie bin was as big as a house. I don’t really understand why SU models would not be life size. Surely that is the whole point.

I know it’s easy to rescale. Or rather, it is if you have at least one known dimension. Oftentimes, you don’t. So what’s the deal here?

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It’s all due to what the author of the model does. If they choose to model at some odd size, there’s nothing the Warehouse can do about it. Some people model at a large scale and might scale the component down for their use but they fail to “Scale the Definition” before uploading it to the Warehouse so when you get it, you’re getting it at the large size.

So the deal is, users do what they want. The Warehouse software has no idea what the real size of a component or model should be so there’s no way for it to correct poorly modeled ones. I guess GIGO applies here.

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I thought that was probably the case but it very much limits the usefulness of the whole concept. I don’t know how easy it would be to implement but if the Warehouse were able to show the defining box size of a model (the Component “container”), it might give you an idea before you take trouble downloading it to tell if it was going to be any use. The Warehouse already shows other useful info like model size in Mb so you wouldn’t think it beyond the wit of man to have physical size reported too.

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Yes. It could be useful. Of course that could also be difficult to get right. There seem to be many components whose bounding boxes are much larger than the geometry and/or have their origins located incorrectly. I guess part of the problem is that there’s no requirement on the part of the user to make a truly correct model–call it creative–and there’s no way to curate the Warehouse. If it was possible to have staff to do it, they could sort models into realistic and non-realistic so you’d know. Of course that might require the Warehouse to be a resource you have to pay to use.

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Filtering by model size sure would be useful.

It is also a common user error to use a different model unit than the one you think you are using, like meters instead of millimeters. I have seen several house models with walls several kilometers high.

Since the early days, SketchUp has used scale figures. Although many 3D warehouse contain them (inadvertently) it would be nice to have them visible when the bots are prepping the image! @Barry @psaal

In early days when the scale figure was Bryce, we’d strip him out of the models, which is probably why we got so many modified Bryce models uploaded. Poor Bryce.

We could, but if I download something off-size, I just cmd-9 (scale tool), 0.5 (half size, or eyeball a percentage, or if it has to be perfect, get an exact reference size). Yea, we could enforce stricter rules, but that’s not what Google wanted in the early days of warehouse. I think there are other ideas in the works to up quality of models.

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I think showing something else than what was modeled would cause a lot of frustration. People would try to find the scale figure in their model and remove it as they can’t remember putting it there. It is not transparent that it is just a 3D image effect added by the server, unless you toggle it with a button or something. It would also be complicated to implement a way of placing a scale figure automatically somewhere it is visible from the camera but no intersecting other geometry.

Measuring physical size would be quite a lot simpler. If done on the diagonal only a single data point is needed. As long as linear mapping doesn’t put all usable components in the bottom 2 px of the slider it would also be highly useful to filter out irrelevant models already when searching, so you don’t even have to manually review them.

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I appreciate this is an old conversation, but the problem persists. If anyone is interested, I’ve made several suggestions, including dealing with scale here: https://forums.sketchup.com/t/please-improve-quality-of-models-shared-on-3d-warehouse/205062?u=mwcs1