Utilizing Geolocation in SketchUp for Accurate Shadow Representation

So I'm still in my topography from scratch file and now we are going to talk about geolocation. SketchUp has a very useful tool called geolocation.

Essentially we can geolocate our model to an exact location in latitude and longitude either based off of a map or based off of the actual latitude and longitude degrees that we know. This is excellent to determine daylighting and shadows to explore various design options and what shadows would do as well as creating more accurate representation of your shadows on your building. Now if we go down to the lower left corner right here this is the geolocation tool.

We can click this and this would open up the geolocation window within the model info tab. We can also go to window, model info, and then geolocation to get to the same spot. Here we have two options.

We can create your model through geolocation with a specific location on a map or we can go to advanced settings and set a manual location if we know the latitude and longitude. Let's first explore add location. When we first click add location this window would open up.

Right now this shows essentially kind of more or less where you are currently at and right now I'm in San Diego. You can see right now that there's this blue kind of blob around this area. That means that this coverage is the high res imagery coverage that's available.

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If I uncheck high res image coverage you can see where we're at in the maps. You can either specifically zoom into a specific area if you know exactly where it's at or you can use this address bar at the top to type in a specific address. I will use the address bar to type in an address.

I will type in 2525 Bacon Street, San Diego and then hit ENTER. That'll bring me right here to this ocean beach athletic area where I want to take a spot. This is where my park is.

So what we have is we have this option to select region and once we click select region this box, this box, this window will open up. But first we need to select a provider for our aerial imagery. DigitalGlobe is free to use and free to download.

However high res near map which is the area that's in blue so it's not every space in the world, this is available for purchase. So you can kind of see here we can download a very more accurate you know in higher res images at a specific price fee. For this video let's go to DigitalGlobe and we'll use that version.

You can kind of can see the pixelation a little bit in the in the ground. Actually you can't really tell a whole lot in this image but I'm sure once you download it you'll be able to see a much higher resolution image. And then we go to DigitalGlobe and here we can start you know dragging in from any of these corners how big of an area that we want to bring into our model right.

So it can be a huge portion or it can be a small portion. Remember the larger that that area is especially if you're like zoomed way out you're going to bring in a huge amount of topography into your model which could it could potentially slow it down. So for this cake I'm just going to create a small little you know square right over here and then I'm going to click import right here.

You can see here that that image was brought in to my site exactly where it's geolocated based off of the origin. If I go back into my admiral imagery I can add an additional area. I'll click select region again and DigitalGlobe and this time I want to add this area over here and I'll click import.

I'm going to move this over so we can see what happened. You will see that second location appear relative to our first image grab location and this brings in both flat topography and also three-dimensional model topography from the DigitalGlobe source. You can see the variations in topography if you go to your dialog box and open up tags.

I'm going to expand this a little bit you can see that there's location snapshot which is visible that's this flat one. We also have this new one that's called image terrain location terrain and this is our three-dimensional. This site's already pretty flat so you can't see a whole lot of geometry change but if I was to like toggle these on and off you can kind of see that you know one has a bit more topography change a dip kind of over here where that road is in relative and this is and this is much more noticeable in more spaces where there's definitely some topography more topography change valleys or hills etc.

I want to go back to my model info tab and geolocation and I'm going to clear location. This is going to cancel out all that stuff that I brought in because you can see right here the latitude and longitude has been built into this exact location and where I where I put this in which is which is where the shadows are going to be determined based off of this location. So I'll click clear location and you can see all those tags were deleted as well as the images on the screen and it also removed the geolocation tag as now this says this model is not geolocated.

Now let's go ahead and set a manual location and we'll click this button right here. Here this gives us options on exactly where to type this in. For this sake I'm going to go type this type latitude 32.7 n and I'm going to do this one at 117.2 west w and then I will click ok.

So this no longer has those aerial maps in the in the model but it's still geolocated in the correct location and then now you can see here it says this model is manually geolocated in this specific location. So it is sometimes pretty important when you're working on a real-world project to know if your model is manually geolocated or if it actually exists in a world site. I will close this window and then zoom extents to get close to my park and I will save my file.