Hey guys, this is Aaron.
I'm going to take a look today at an extension called PlaceMaker.
PlaceMaker is an incredibly powerful extension that allows you to create entire cities with
just a few clicks of the mouse button.
PlaceMaker is available through Extension Warehouse.
It is a paid extension, so you do have to purchase it for full functionality, though
there is a trial version that'll give you a little bit of a taste of how PlaceMaker
works and the kind of output you can get from it.
I'm going to go ahead and hop in here right now.
There are three buttons in the PlaceMaker toolbar.
The first one, if I click, brings up the PlaceMaker UI.
PlaceMaker UI is very simple, very clean, easy to use.
The other two buttons, just FYI, will take you through a tour of PlaceMaker to give you
an idea of everything that PlaceMaker does and take you to Open Street Maps.
The third button will just jump you over to Open Street Maps so you can login and interact
there.
So jumping into PlaceMaker.
PlaceMaker does require a geo-referenced model.
So right here I have a section of Chicago, Illinois.
And you can get this the standard way by going File>Geo-location, and then picking where
you want to geo-locate your model, or they give you a handy little shortcut, little button
right here, will launch that right away.
So I went through that, I already placed the model in Chicago.
And what we're going to do now is we're going to run through and actually generate the section
of the city using PlaceMaker.
There's a couple ways to do it.
One is: each of these buttons is going to create, not download, but generate, a piece
of the model.
Imagery will replace the existing Google imagery with the Digital Globe imagery, and
then the rest of the buttons generate what they say: roads, paths, buildings, water,
or trees.
There is a button at the top that will just automatically run all the pieces at once,
so if I click this it'll just run everything and give me my new place.
Just for the sake of this demonstration I'm going to run through bit by bit and show you
everything it does, one piece at a time.
So I'm going to start by selecting, I have to select the terrain I want to generate on,
and then click the imagery button.
Now, imagery is going to be downloaded from Digital Globe and it will cost you credits.
So with every purchase of PlaceMaker you get a certain number of credits every month.
So this is telling me that to download this section of Chicago is going to cost me 24
credits.
It will prompt you every time: here's how many you have left, here's how many this is
going to cost, and confirm before it starts downloading.
I'm going to go ahead and hit download, and it's going to bring in a series of images
that replaces the imagery from Google Earth that it had on there before.
The rest of these I'm going to actually do from the bottom up, I'm going to go to trees
and I'm going to click on trees.
What that's going to do, whoops, I do have to select this surface before I hit trees.
And what that's going to do is it's going to run through Open Street Maps and see where
people have called out trees and then place tree geometry there.
So my trees are placed based on presets I have in here.
So each of these has a set of presets like this.
What library, what trees do I want to put in there?
What do I want to put to represent those trees?
What size are those trees going to be?
And do I want to drop them onto the surface?
In this case everything is flat, but if I had terrain, rolling hills that sort of thing,
it would adjust for that if I have drop onto surface selected.
The data that comes back from Open Street Maps is basic information of where things
are, not necessarily real specific information, so you can actually set some of your information
like "How big do I want my roads to be?"
"How big do I want my paths to be?"
"What do I want to do for buildings?"
"How large should those be?"
So there's a lot of options in here as far as controlling how your image is going to
get created.
How this model's going to get created.
So I'm going to run through the rest of the steps here.
I'm going to go ahead and bring in water.
And again, that's just going to run out, check Open Street Maps and then create that geometry.
Same thing with buildings.
It's going to pull in a bunch of buildings.
Buildings is interesting because it will not just bring in, some of these that you see
are representations, just the footprint extruded, but some models have actually been placed
into Open Street Maps and those will actually come in as SketchUp Models like this.
So pretty cool depending on the place you're importing you may see more of those.
The final two steps are paths and roads.
So I'm just going to go ahead and import those.
And I'm going to do a little fast forward here because paths and roads geometry downloading
and creating those does take a few seconds so I'm going to skip ahead to when all of
my paths or walkways are imported.
And final step is roads.
Same thing.
Going to let this load for a few seconds and then hop back in.
And there we have roads.
Once all this is imported, this geometry actually kind of sorts itself out, PlaceMaker creates
a bunch of scenes and layers that allow me to go in and turn these individual pieces
on and off.
Which is a great way of organizing that model.
This is one example, just a quick example, but to run through a couple other things and
show you some of the things it can do, if I hop into this New York model you can see
that somebody has done a lot of modeling in Open Street Maps and put a lot of data up
there.
So you can actually see all these models, all this was pulled in directly, again same
couple of clicks I did for Chicago, but I got a much more detailed model based on the
information for that location.
The other option that PlaceMaker can be used with, we'll see here in Boulder, Colorado.
Is turning terrain on.
So in this case I imported a section of the foothills outside of town, and you can see,
nothing here is flat, actually see how the buildings step up the grade here.
And my roads and paths actually go along the mountain back here.
All that happens automatically by telling it to drop those paths onto the surface and
then import them.
And that's really all there was to it.
So that is PlaceMaker in a nutshell.
It really is that simple: you click a couple buttons, you get these great looking buildings,
great looking cities, and it is a huge time saver if you're looking to create a model
that has a lot of buildings, whether it's a backdrop or just kind of a good looking
piece of an existing city or area, PlaceMaker is worth checking out.
Thank you!