Michelangelo on The Details

 

“Trifles make perfection,
and perfection is no trifle.”

– Michelangelo (1475–1564)

Italian painter and sculptor

The story, 1820, slightly edited to modernize it.)…

A friend called on Michelangelo, who was finishing a statue. Sometime afterwards he called again. The sculptor was still at his work.

His friend looking at the figure exclaimed, “You have been idle since I saw you last.”

“By no means,” replied the sculptor, “I have retouched this part, and polished that. I have softened this feature, and brought out this muscle. I have given more expression to this lip, and more energy to this limb.”

“Well, well,” said his friend, “but all these are trifles.”

“It may be so,” replied Michelangelo, “but recollect that trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.”

The University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley

 

Dr. Andrew Shears is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin – Fox Valley, and this past semester he led a great project in his GEO 106 class – modeling the entire campus!

He first divided the campus into five sections for his 20 students to tackle, then set them to work. The end result is an excellent model of the campus that all of us will get to enjoy:

 

uw-fox.jpg 

The models have been submitted to Google for approval, though they aren’t yet showing up in the base layer of 3D Buildings in Google Earth. I’d expect to see them arrive in the next week or two.

Dr. Shears has written a very detailed blog entry that walks you through every aspect of the modeling process. It looks like it was a great class, the students learned a lot, and the resulting model is something that they can all be proud of!

The University of Alberta

We’re big fans of 3D buildings and the realism that they add to Google Earth, and universities around the world are continuing to be the leaders in that area. Recently we showed you Terbuka University in Indonesia, and previously we’ve shown you excellent 3D campuses from Northeastern, the University of Wisonsin-Fox Valley, Central Florida and dozens of others.

Today we’ll take a look at the University of Alberta. Lawrence Kwok emailed us to let us know that a team of himself and three other students (Max Amerongen, Matthew Hale and Veronica Krawcewicz) have modeled the majority of the campus, and it’s looking great!

u-a.jpg

While the buildings are looking excellent, they’re far from finished. This summer they’re working through an initiative to redesign the online campus map. While the map currently has quite a lot of data in it already, they’re hoping to improve the mobile experience.

To explore their 3D buildings for yourself, you can visit this page on Google Maps or download this KML file to fly directly to it in Google Earth.

via: GoogleEarthBlog