Google Earth 3D details, how? Anything alike for unity?

I own and use many terrain plugins, such as terraincomposer, worldcomposer and RTP however, they all rely on 3D model placment of trees, walls and rocks ETC.

I would love to be able to do what google earth does and pull 3D data from the terrain for such things as dense forests. (see the attached image) Is there any way this could be done, or any know how its done?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_photogrammetry_software

There are programs that allow generation of 3d data from multiple images. You can theoretically create this kind of image by flying a drone (or better - a plane) over area and photographing it, then running software over it.

Before you get all excited, keep in mind that this is incredibly storage/computationally epxensive and processing data may take hours if not days, and results may be very far from perfect, plus you need expensive gear for it. There are also issues with rights to objects you photographed...

 

Seen some asset store plugins that can get buildings, roads etc from google, i think some had trees also..

here is one using open street map, says it can get trees from it..
http://infinity-code.com/en/products/real-world-terrain

couldn't find the others now..

 

Might be OK for flyovers, but the other issue is that it's pretty low-quality up-close. Home sweet home (and even this is more or less flyover altitude):

 

Is... is that your home?

 

lol... yeah. Designed it myself.
(The yard was recovering from the pool install when Google took those pix.)

 

Speaking of which, I believe it is possible to legally extract terrain elevation mesh using google sketchup. Or at least it was used to be possible. The info should be on youtube somewhere.

 

Won't google be using LiDAR point cloud data to generate it's terrain?

The data you are seeing in Google 3D is very low quality when you see the accuracy of LiDAR point cloud data for a street.

I though anyone working on automatic cars was gathering LiDAR data for roads and terrain.

Great looking example of sampling point cloud data and using your head!

 

Hard to tell. Google relies on satellites for google earth, and lidar seem to be designed to use a plane? Not sure.

Either way.

This it tokyo on google maps. You know, running in a browser

Spoiler

This is automatically recconstructed model of the city, probably based off some of the technologies I saw on youtube when I was looking into photogrammetry.

//there was a much more impressive video, but I can' find it.

Aaand, of course you can't use any of it. You can't access the data, and if you could, using it would be against google's tos.

 

This looks like google car captured LiDAR, note how tops and corners of buildings lose detail, if it was a plane or drone based LiDAR the tops of buildings would be high detail with loss of detail in shadowed areas.

 

If you're speaking of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar

I.e. laser-based scaning, I think you're probably wrong. I think this is an image-based reconstruction.

Something along the lines of:

Besides I don't think that a google car would be allowed to drive in circles in that park. Or on that stadium. Also, roofs have geometry and textures on them.

 

It's definitely photogrammetry, it came out in 2012 when Google Earth was still a separate product.

http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2012/06/google_announces_upcoming_3d.html

And if you need more evidence, LIDAR would do a better job with overhangs.

http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2014/09/more-analysis-of-3d-imagery.html

 

Yup, definitely photgrammetry. This:

Spoiler

^^^ is exactly the kind of artifacts you get with image-based solutions.

 

lol... that's even better. My first thought when I saw this stuff was that everything looks melted.

 

Thanks for all the info , ive done a lot of looking into this and it seems its its obviously not really something that can be done yet in unity.

As im not interested in buildings or "close" quality, do you think this effect could be achieved using some sort of tessellation shader?

What I am trying to do is get forest areas and tree lines to be like the above photo (first post)

Thanks

 

What about Map Box?

PS Maybe a Voxel based terrain shader could best morph the terrain in a treelike way.