OGLE: The coolest thing I've seen in a while! (or 3D screenshots-to-model!)
Wow, am I jazzed about this:
http://ogle.eyebeamresearch.org/
It's a tool that lets you take 3D 'screenshots' and save them down as 3D models. So, like, you open up Google Earth, hit a keyboard combo, and it saves what you're looking at as a 3D model. See, here's looking at the area surrounding my new gig:
And here's that same 3D info grabbed out of Google Earth, Buildings and all, and then pulled into Revit:
It works for games too. Some people are using it to generate 3D models of their Everquest/WoW characters, so that they can clean up the mesh and get them 3D printed. So that they can have a real-world little figurine of their in-game character. THAT'S SO COOL!
(image from the OGLE site)
Or, in my case, I could grab a model from something and then feed it to the CNC-table to make a real-world version!
It works like this, and it only works with programs that use OpenGL:
It's actually two tools, one that can siphon off the OpenGL system calls, and this OGLE tool that can then turn those calls into a .OBJ file.
Whenever your system is using OpenGL for anything, it's sending the 3D info you're looking at to the graphics card, which then draws it on the screen. It does this because it's faster that way than the processor doing that job instead. So once it's set up you hit a keyboard combo that you define to trigger it, it steps in and grabs a 'frame' of info, and then passes it to the OGLE tool, which then in turn turns that OpenGL data into a standard .OBJ file. You then can open that file in any 3D application, and in the above example I saved it out as a DWG using 3D Studio and then imported it into Revit...
Wow, am I jazzed about this:
http://ogle.eyebeamresearch.org/
It's a tool that lets you take 3D 'screenshots' and save them down as 3D models. So, like, you open up Google Earth, hit a keyboard combo, and it saves what you're looking at as a 3D model. See, here's looking at the area surrounding my new gig:
And here's that same 3D info grabbed out of Google Earth, Buildings and all, and then pulled into Revit:
It works for games too. Some people are using it to generate 3D models of their Everquest/WoW characters, so that they can clean up the mesh and get them 3D printed. So that they can have a real-world little figurine of their in-game character. THAT'S SO COOL!
(image from the OGLE site)
Or, in my case, I could grab a model from something and then feed it to the CNC-table to make a real-world version!
It works like this, and it only works with programs that use OpenGL:
It's actually two tools, one that can siphon off the OpenGL system calls, and this OGLE tool that can then turn those calls into a .OBJ file.
Whenever your system is using OpenGL for anything, it's sending the 3D info you're looking at to the graphics card, which then draws it on the screen. It does this because it's faster that way than the processor doing that job instead. So once it's set up you hit a keyboard combo that you define to trigger it, it steps in and grabs a 'frame' of info, and then passes it to the OGLE tool, which then in turn turns that OpenGL data into a standard .OBJ file. You then can open that file in any 3D application, and in the above example I saved it out as a DWG using 3D Studio and then imported it into Revit...
Now, I tried going the other way just to see what would happen, and Revit's OpenGL use doesn't seem to work with the OGLE tool. It does work with the OpenGL capture tool, so you can get to the data, so we'll see if it just takes some tweaking to get it to go.
But with Google Earth, you just need to set up the .ini file that the capturing tool and OGLE use properly, and it works like a champ. The two key things here were to copy the system OpenGL.dll file into the Google Earth application folder (after renaming it to opengl.orig.dll) & uncommenting the line in the .ini file that tells it to use that one (as the 'old' one); and to set the scale way, way up, like 10000000000 times up, for the data is *tiny* for some reason coming out of Google Earth.