Applying Eye Shadow to Google Earth
This is an update for my London Eye, time animation, adding an animated shadow.
SketchUp has an extremely useful built-in Heliodon, simulating the precise location of the sun for any time of the year, and enabling shadow rendering. With a reasonably accurate model, it’s possible to get a good alignment match between SketchUp shadows and those in Google Earth’s imagery .
What I’ve done here is use screenshots of my wheel’s SketchUp shadows to create a time series of ground overlays in Google Earth. These move in step with the original animated 3d model of the London Eye .
The shadow images still need a bit of work (and possibly higher resolution) to make them blend in better with the rest of the ground photography. But I’ll leave that for another day… in other words, I’m not completely sure how to do it at the moment :)
London Eye with shadows
880kB
(The viewing tips for the original animation apply to this one too.)
Here’s a basic outline of how I got the shadows from SketchUp into Google Earth:
- Copied the model into 20 separate SketchUp layers, rotating the wheel by slightly different amounts in each layer.
- Toggled on SketchUp shadow rendering, with the appropriate date and time setting - January 29, 11:30.
- Switched to SketchUp’s overhead view.
- Flipped between the layers taking screenshots of each.
- I cropped the screenshots, and added alpha transparency in PS Pro.
- Aligned a single one of these pictures in GE and created a Ground Overlay time series with the 20 pictures.
- The original GE wheel shadow is Photoshopped out with a further image overlay.
Posted By James On June 9th, 2007.
Comments: 11
Comments
Comment from Morten
Time: June 9, 2007, 9:10 pm
I would hate to go on to this thing at that speed, so just to nit pick a bit… it takes about ½ hour to do one revolution.
Comment from GregTSL
Time: June 9, 2007, 10:15 pm
Wow, excellent work!
Comment from María
Time: June 10, 2007, 1:24 pm
It’s really awesome, congratulations!
I’ve just written about it in my blog for Spanish speaker users of Google Earth.
Pingback from Google empieza a darle movimiento a las imágenes de Google Earth (4D) :
Time: June 11, 2007, 12:12 pm
[…] está experimentando con las imágenes de satélite de Google Earth para darle movimiento y sombras para de esta manera […]
Pingback from Imagenes en movimiento en Google Earth | luigix.com
Time: June 16, 2007, 7:01 am
[…] está experimentando con las imágenes de satélite de Google Earth para darle movimiento y sombras para de esta manera […]
Comment from Jono
Time: June 22, 2007, 3:08 pm
Uh, you made a statement about higher resolutions? surely if u export an image from Sketchup instead of takinga screen shot you’ll get super res?
i dunno hey, i export at 4000 pixels wide usually and that makes my images clearly then they are on screen in Skup!
Good work.
Jono
Comment from James
Time: June 23, 2007, 2:09 pm
Thanks Jono,
I missed that… IIRC Google SU5 didn’t have high resolution 2D export. Just assumed SU6 was similar.
4000px ought to fix it 
Pingback from Google Earth Imagery Updates
Time: July 27, 2007, 11:51 pm
[…] first I need to recreate the overlays for my London Eye animation. Which because of the colour change now looks like it’s surrounded by an oil […]
Comment from Andrew
Time: August 5, 2007, 6:00 am
Just caught up to reading back posts on the Sketchup blog…and I’m glad I did! This is truly amazing! Congratulations on such a magnificent creation and thanks from all of us who get to enjoy it! i’m thinking you’ve probably gotten some wheels turning over at Sketchup too..maybe in a future release we’ll see something to make time-series production easier!
Comment from fyrwet
Time: October 26, 2007, 12:07 pm
Amazing thing!
Pingback from Animated GIFs
Time: January 28, 2008, 1:46 am
[…] on from the GIF animation used in my recent London Eye post, I’ve decided to make GIFs for all my other Google Earth time […]
Write a comment