There’s a reason that more buildings are not yet phototextured in Google Earth – it’s a ton of work. Microsoft has uploaded a significant number of phototextured buildings in its Live Earth, but many of them are done using aerial photography and other automated methods, and the quality difference is obvious. The InsideGoogle blog has posted on this before, noting that often the Virtual Earth buildings are darker, with a ‘melted wax’ look. To get highly realistic models for a virtual world, much of the modeling has to be done manually.

The City of Denver in Microsoft Virtual Earth Vs Google Earth (From InsideGoogle)

Virtual Earth

Google Earth

 

We recently began a new project that involves modeling the equivalent of a small city. The details of the project will be confidential until it’s completion, but we’ll be sure to post some images as soon as we can. The project involves creating very high-quality, photo-textured models of nearly 1000 buildings. We estimate that the entire project should take about six months, and the resulting model set will be the most detailed model posted to Google Earth yet, with detailed storefronts, street level terrain, aerial photography support, and interactive models.

So what’s it take to do a project of this size? Glad you asked. For starters, lots and lots of photos. This is the first project we have taken on where we have deployed an entire on-site team, and it speaks to the complexity involved in completing a project like this. For almost three weeks, we had 4 photographers and two project managers living and working on-site collecting data. The result is over 100GB of photos stored and backed up on 3 different hard drives. That data will now be scrubbed and uploaded to our servers where our modelers will go to work. 25 of the most well-trained, experienced Sketchup modelers around the world will now begin the very long process of stitching together thousands of individual photographs to create usable photos that will then be added to massed buildings.

Here’s an example of the process from a recent project in Broomfield, CO - the Flatirons Mall (click here to download the whole model to GoogleEarth):

Raw Photos: Renderings: