Excellent updates to Brazil’s "Christ the Redeemer" statue

GEB reader ‘Peter’ recently wrote to tell us about some updates he made to the “Christ the Redeemer” statue in Rio de Janerio, Brazil. It was already a great model in Google Earth, but now it’s even more impressive.

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The statue itself is largely unchanged, but the surrounding area is quite complete. It now includes the train cars up near the statue, an improved parking structure, individual umbrellas for guests to enjoy, and even some of the interior work inside the base of the statue.

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As of today, the new model is not yet part of the base layer in Google Earth. However, you can download it from the 3D Warehouse here to see it for yourself.

Peter has made a nice video to show off all of the features in the new model, which you can see here:

Have you seen any other very well-crafted 3D models lately?

Holiday Trees throughout Google Earth

Now that Google has introduced 3D trees to Google Earth 6, they’ve decided to take it a step further and drop decorated trees in various places around the globe.

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According to their blog, these special trees can be found in 14 different locations. However, they’ve only revealed 11 of them. Here are the 11 that they’ve shown:

• Boston Common, Boston, MA
• Skyline Park, Denver, CO
• Grove Plaza, Boise, ID
• Alster Fountain, Hamburg, Germany
• North Capital of Texas Highway, Austin, TX
• Place Du Parvis Notre-Dame, Paris, France
• Old Town Square, Prague, Czech Republic
• Red Square, Moscow, Russia
• Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY
• Pier 39, San Francisco, CA
• Trafalgar Square, London, England

I tracked down those 11 trees and loaded them into this KMZ file for you. Now, who can find the other three?

Below is the video that shows off the first 11. Leave a comment if you’re able to find any of the others.

Announcing the Google SketchUp + Ponoko Challenge Winner

The winner of the Google SketchUp + Ponoko Challenge is in. Congratulations to Ed Lewis, aka Fungus Amungus, who created a wonderful instructable about using SketchUp with Ponoko 3D printing!

In his instructable, Ed walks through 7 easy steps to go from a simple cube in SketchUp to a 3D printed, level-3 Menger sponge.

Menger sponge in SketchUp and printed with Ponoko’s durable plastic.

Ed has won a SketchUp Pro license, a 12-month subscription to Ponoko Prime and a $537 Ponoko digital making voucher.

Upon winning, Ed told us, “it’s great to see more and more tools of creation, like Ponoko, being opened up to everyone.” We couldn’t agree more.

Congrats to Ed for winning the grand prize and congrats to Ponoko for making a great 3D printing tool!