Wyatt Thompson, PLA

BTW, you have to have the Earth plugin to view GE and 45×360 degree content in Google Maps.

Have you found a list of cities for Pictometry images? Ultimately availability is what will win customers. If none of these services have the imagery I need for the city I’m working in, then they don’t do me any good. (Incidentally, Bing Maps won’t show 3D…[Read more]

Thomas,
Try here. The current list of cities for Google Maps is short, but more cities have 45 degree images available for Building Maker production.

This is the first I’ve heard of this site, but the photos look great. I’ll be watching this topic as I’m interested in how others are using this service.

Not sure how the quality and coverage compares to Pictometry, but Bing and Google Maps both offer oblique aerials. Google Maps also integrates with SketchUp 8 and Building Maker.

Kerkythea is a rendering plug-in for Sketchup to create photorealistic images from SU models.
http://www.kerkythea.net/

There are lots of rendering programs that will do this. The learning curve and cost varies greatly between them.

Twilight Render, SU Podium, and Kerkythea all work from within SketchUp and can produce quite good results. They all use the same render engine so you’ll likely get similar results with each. The quality of the final image will depend…[Read more]

This is quite different from the aquarium photos, but you could try sheet piles. They would look urban, in an industrial sense, but that may not be the urban style you’re looking for. The volunteers also might need some professional help driving and cutting the piles.

Amen. I deal with these sentiments all the time and it drives me crazy. “We’ve never done it that way before” is as much of a productivity killer as it is a cliche.

The Conservation Discovery Center in downtown Kansas City isn’t really a park, per se, but it’s definitely park-like, urban, and incorporates BMPs in an educational way.

Also 10,000 Rain Gardens has some examples of urban rain gardens.

Good job on the grasses. The structure doesn’t appear to cast a shadow.

I, too, have been surprised at the disdain for xrefs. I work in a civil/landscape architecture office so maybe that’s why I’ve come to rely on them so heavily. We typically have a single base drawing that is generated initially by our survey crews in the field. All existing and proposed layers are placed into this one drawing – utilities, grading,…[Read more]

The company I work for does a lot of turf sports fields. Typically our engineers spec the products, but I’ve picked up a few things in conversations and plan reviews. Generally, the artificial turfs available on the market are vastly superior to the “astroturf” product that began it all. I’ve seen samples of some of the current lines and many of…[Read more]

Have you tried searching for Arabic fonts? Several years ago I needed Chinese characters and was able to download a font, load it, and type.

It’s an interesting read, for sure. If you ever have the opportunity to hear Cameron Sinclair (co-founder of Architecture for Humanity) speak, I would definitely recommend it.

Check out http://designlikeyougiveadamn.architectureforhumanity.org/. The book and organization focus primarily on architecture for disaster relief, but I think a lot of the ideas/solutions could be applied to homelessness in America.

I read an article in Wired about the making of the film. He did indeed have horticulturalists on staff, as well as botanists and others. His team actually created a an encyclopedia of sorts with a classification system (complete with diagrams, measurements, habitat, etc from what I understand) for all the plants and animals in the movie. This is…[Read more]