It’s been a few months since we’ve talked about Building Maker, when they added the slick feature to use Street View imagery inside of the tool. Building Maker is a free set of tools Google created to make it easier for people to create photo-realistic 3D models for Google Earth. Google continues to work hard to improve the product and they’ve just announced a few nice additions:
• New cities: Oklahoma City (Oklahoma), Oslo (Norway), The Hague (The Netherlands). Also, they recently released imagery for San Antonio (Texas), Tucson (Arizona), Norfolk (Virginia), Salt Lake City (Utah).
• Expanded coverage: San Diego (California) and Portland (Oregon).
I’m particularly excited to see them expanding existing cities. Many of the building maker cities have pretty solid 3D coverage in the available area, and it can be difficult to find a available building that still needs to be be modeled. The expansions seem to be quite extensive, too — for example, the available area in San Diego appears to be more than 10x the available area in Atlanta. As Google continues to add/expand cities, the tool will only become more useful, creating a more realistic world for all of us.
Head over to the Building Maker site to try it for yourself.
Have you created any models in Building Maker lately?