Tobi Merk is a Supermodeler from Germany whose models of Nördlingen are second to none. He’s also an accomplished snow sculptor – I find myself especially drawn to his subject matter.
A stunning rendition, Herr Merk.
If you have 10 minutes, you can even watch the magic in process.
We have just fallen in love with Google SketchUp all over again, we are slightly late to the table on this one but Google Building Maker is now fully integrated into SketchUp 8. It has the genius ofCanoma with the addition of all the editing functions that come with SketchUp and its free:
Combine this with the free version of Unity and you have a very powerful toolset. Talking of which, we have just downloaded Unity 3.0 to further develop our agent based modelling exhibition space, its good to be back….
As you probably heard, Tropical Cyclone Yasi recently made landfall just south of Cairns, Australia. Residents have had plenty of time to make plans, so hopefully most were able to get out of the path of the storm.
Yesterday, NASA’s Aqua satellite captured an amazing image of the storm, which you can see here:
To view that image in Google Earth, simply download this KML file
.
Another great source of information about the storm was the aus-maps severe weather page. They had a lot of info on the page, and also included special maps such as this one, from which you could pull down the KMZ file and view it yourself in Google Earth.
There has also been some very useful threads over in the Google Earth Community, with users sharing information and files as quickly as they became available.
Finally, don’t forget about the Weather Layer that’s built into Google Earth. The forecasts aren’t particularly helpful for a storm like this, but quick access to the satellite imagery for the area is certainly a great feature to have.
