The Commander Series Forum

Hey everyone,
I have a question to everyone here and especially those skilled with computers and photoshop. Would it be possible to use the 3d building textures from google earth to make paper buildings?

Interesting idea. If you have a fairly boxy building and can get square on views then it should be fairly straight forward. It will also depend on how good the resolution of the images are compared to the scale you want.

Have you seen any WWII era ones, I might give it a go.

I've found some interesting ones. I'll give you the coordinates for them on google earth. The buildings that I've just spotted are in Riga as I'm going there for holidays but certainly I've seen ones all across Germany. Some of the buildings at these coordinates would work.
56°58'0.04"N 24° 8'46.07"E

This site has some buildings that were done using photographs.
http://www.iandrea.co.uk/wargames/
with this page telling how he did it
http://www.iandrea.co.uk/wargames/6mm/buildings...

Printing the buildings on heavy card stock for 6mm would avoid having to make a plastic shell.

From a look at Riga on Google Earth it seems that you only get quite low resolution overhead views. Which aren't a lot of use for making buildings, you can only make a floor plan, but can't get any details of the walls.

If Google has done StreeView in the area you are looking at then you may fare better. But having looked at my street you will still have problems with parked cars, passers by and lamp posts and such like. You will also struggle to get more than just front views of most buildings.

So overall they are useful tools to get a feel for an area and its terrain, but not sure that you can get enough detail for making model houses.

Perhaps more usefully I have just found Google's 3D warehouse
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/search?q...
The above is a link for normandy a search for Holland mainly produced new buildings.

IIRC there is a plugin for google sketchup that allows you to unfold a model so that it can be used to make a paper model.