The images are pretty decent. This is a mix of a lot of visual clues from different sources: Google Earth provides the underlying map and stretched 3D buildings, my software provided the road network, Sketchup's 3D wharehouse provided treet, streetcars, fruit stands, people, cars, etc, and I modeled a few things like the new buildings and market stands. And yes, that is Homer Simpson's car in the third shot, for all you discontinuity fans out there.
I'll admit that my software didn't contribute much to this project. In fact the roads it made were in places incomplete and in other places needed to be stretched to fit the actual area. Union Square itself had to be completely redrawn since I wasn't interested in the existing roads. Unfortunately, my program at the time made each road segment its own component, so I had to edit each component to put details on it. I've learned from this mistake and now the roads render as one single entity that isn't even part of a group. Whether one should make the roads a separate group or not is still up for debate, as is whether one should add streetcars, bike lanes, etc to the roads group itself or just stick them on top of the road group. You won't care if you've never used Sketchup. And that's what the software must assume.
During the project, I struggled to lay down streetcar track. First I downloaded track and tried to make it fit together around curving roads. That was a huge disaster that I won't expose a user too. I finally gave in and just drew appropriately spaced lines for the tracks, but even that was a huge challenge. What I need is to let the user hit a but or drag a panel onto the road that represents a streetcar track. The panel should be adjust to fit the road correctly, and then be stretchable to any length and follow the curve of the road. That applies to streetcar tracks, bus lanes, bike lanes and any other right-of-way.
I desperately need to make a tool that constrains movement to the XY plane. Sketchup is simply asinine in this respect. It let's you constrain movement to one axis, but heaven forbid you want do move something diagonally across the street. It assumes you want to adjust the height of the object. I literally found myself with cars 20 feet in the air after I thought I was dragging them to another street. I want to constrain all dragging to the ground unless the user specifies that they want to lift something in the air or put it underground. In the meantime I have to tack along the X and Y axes to go diagonal.
I found that creating stretched buildings in Google Earth isn't impossible, but it's not much fun either. I don't really want to expose my users to that. Hopefully I can automatically download the buildings already modeled in their neighborhood from the Google Earth API. The best bet for the other buildings is to give the user an easy tool for building modeling. Tell them to grab the building tool and then trace the satellite image of the building footprint. This will take a face and expand it twenty feet in the air to approximate any building.
As I've planned before, the user will need a host of pre-loaded 3D objects, like streetcars, bikes, people, and trees, so that they can minimize trips to the 3D warehouse. The 3D warehouse is fun to use, but inexperienced users need a simple set of objects at their finger tips.
I backed up the Union Square rendering throughout the process, so I can present building Union Square as an animated example of how to use the software. Of course, this project didn't use the software, so this demo might make a good "look how hard this is without my software!"
I learned lots of other things about how to write a good report. Report generation comes much later in the game, but at least these assignments are filling my head with possibilities.
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