Walker Young of the Taiwan 360 VR Panograph blog has used our tutorial on creating panoramas in Google Earth for his view of Taipei in Taiwan.
Interestingly he has used a Four Seasons to create the clouds above the city. Four Seasons allows the user to replace the sky in images using the ‘magic wand’ tool.
There are a number of cloud settings as well as the option to place the sun/moon in the image.
You can view the Google Earth Panorama of Taipei here.
Pixel Art makes us smile, it provides a unique view on the world and is often used to produce pixel based towns. In general Pixel Art can be defined as anything drawn in the medium of computer pixels – these are usually created one pixel at a time at small scale to reduce the time taken to create the images.
The beauty of Pixel Art is the clean and unique image they can create, especially when moving to the isometric viewpoint. One such example is the Pixel Tower, pictured left, which demonstrates the type of image that Pixel Art creates.
Creating Pixel Art seems to be a slow process, mainly in MS Paint, drawing pixel by pixel. To understand the concept there is a great tutorial on Isometric Pixel Art by PixelFreak.
While we like Pixel Art we are not sure we have the patience to create it, especially as the majority of our work is 3D in the first place. To take a short cut, which we know will be frowned upon in the Pixel Art world, we have used SketchUp to recreate similar views. This post is out first take on the technique using the Euston Tower in London as a test.
SketchUp, as its name suggests allows simple shading and edge outlines to its 3D models. While it is not directly suited to photorealitic work, it is suited to simple Pixel Art creation. Creating Pixel Art in SketchUp is a simple 3 step process:
1) Create your model as normal in SketchUp, or download one from the SketchUp 3D Warehouse.
2) Set your camera view to ‘ISO’ – Isometric, this gives you the angle at which Isometric Pixel Art is created.
3) Select ‘Camera’ from the menu list and unclick ‘Perspective’, your view should now be similar to our Euston Tower or simple Tate Modern example as pictured below.
Using this technique you will be able to rapidly create a Pixel Art town which can of course still be viewed in 3D should you so wish.
Feel free to send us any images or SketchUp files, it would be interesting to create a SketchUp Pixel Art town..
Back to work after last weeks AGI conference and this week brings a range of thoughts on creating cities and visualising urban form.
We will be posting some more Google Earth Panoramas shortly as well as a quick and easy way to create clouds in Photoshop. Also later today, if we get the time, there will be a post on PixelArt and cities, an intriguing way to draw and visualise urban form in MSPaint.
Later this week we are at a conference on Grid Computing to look at batch rendering for city visualisation and simple ways to visualise data in Google Maps. At CASA we have produced a demo of visualising GPS data in both Google Maps and Google Earth simultaneously complete with animation. We should be able to get the demo up later this week.
Finally a free piece of software to convert ESRI .shp files to Google Maps is in the pipeline from CASA and we will run a preview on this as soon as we can.
A slow down on posts this week as we have been at the Association of Geographical Information 2006 conference presenting a paper on our use of Goolge Earth in Local Government. Of note, although sadly we missed the session on Google Earth due to other work, is that Google Earth is planning to include a ‘Time Line’ feature which should allow some level of animation.
ArcExplorer looks like its heading for a December release with full functionality based on a Arc backend server. So any GIS functions such as ‘line of sight’ etc seem to centre on you owning a ESRI server license. We assumed ArcExplorer would be GIS for the masses but if its only GIS as long as the data providers run a Arc server (?).
From talking to various data providers and users at the conference the consensus is that they also need to get some people to work on the look and feel of the user interface as at the moment its a bit clunky and does not compare well to Google Earth.
On a positive note about ArcExplorer though its looking like it will be released without any usage restrictions so companies and local government can use it free of charge. This is obviously not the case with the free version of Google Earth which is only for ‘personal use’.