12 replies to this topic

[Harlon Suttle]

Too cool.....but what do you do when the site is covered with trees...LOL....get out the chain saw.....just a thought....

 

the new project is the contemporary design.....this has great marketing possibilities..... just need to find a sub to cut the trees prior to model placement..hehehe...

 

 

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[Harlon Suttle]

Oops....picked the wrong file

 

[Michael Roman]

I have used this feature on 2 projects to help the customer locate the house on the site. It was winter in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (300" of snow) and we couldn't get into the site to reference the pins located at the corners of the site. It wasn't exact but was close enough to get the house where it needed to be.

Worked great, but the lots were also relatively free from trees. I could see that being somewhat of an issue.......

[Mike Downing]

I wonder if something like Photoshop Elements could be used to "cut" the trees down? By that I mean erase. If you capture the Google earth portion as an image.

[Keith Almond]

If you put your Softplan building on a flat grass site, then won't the grass of the site overlay the photo, and effectively cut the trees down anyway!

[Harlon Suttle]

Now....THAT is thinking outside the box......hmmmm...if it works, I wonder if I could sell my lawn mover and weed eater.....I will just do a model of my current house and drop it in and hope I am done cutting the grass this season....lol

[Harlon Suttle]

Well, following up on what Keith had to say....here is another site....and I did put it on a flat site...only a few inches thick...and because this site slope from front to back the trees on the front of the lot are trimmed out....pretty cool.....

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[Chris Proost]

I tried to do this tonight but the .KMZ file has been importing (or opening, whatever the term is) for several hours. How long did it take you guys to import your file into Google Earth?

[Harlon Suttle]

less than a minute....very simple....both projects need some adjusting after they landed.....so  right click on the properties.....and several Green crosses appeared to MOVE the plan to the correct spot on the site 

[Harlon Suttle]

One thing I did have to do was change the site to a flat boundary....at first was getting an error that Google Earth could not read the file

[randolph cohn]

about removing the trees from the site.

 

we have discussed in the past about a program that will remove items in a picture,

like an existing house(s),  trees,  power poles, buildings, etc.

that you want to use for a "CLEAN""background" picture in a rendering,

 

anyone remember the name of the program ?

 

but in something like a site where you viewing it from the sky,

having a site with grass and other amenities does just as well,

[Mark Petri]

I just scrub the offending parts of the picture out in Adobe Elements or another picture editing program.

[Chris Proost]

I've been back and forth with SoftPlan tech on this and tried to reduce the amount of triangles by turning off various elements of the plan but still haven't had any luck even with the simplest plan I have in my portfolio. I had a hunch that it was a 2014 to 2016 conversion thing and sure enough a plan I draw from scratch in 2016 imports into Google Earth just fine but the plans that were up-converted to 2016 don't seem to work. Has anyone else experienced this?