Digital Cities of the 21th Century

Many people out there would like to get their home or business modeled in 3D for Google Earth, but don’t have the time or expertise to use Google SketchUp to do it themselves. Over time, Building Maker may provide a good way to do it, but right now it only covers a tiny fraction of the earth and the models tend to be lower quality than hand-designed buildings. What do you do in the meantime?

We talked last year about a few options. Concept3D and CyberCity3D both have packages available, and both do excellent work. The only problem is the pricing; Concept3D starts at $325, and CyberCity is likely in the same area (though they don’t list prices). They’re certainly worth the price, but what if you just want a simple model ?

Estate3D is a new service that will model your home or business for just $99. They’ll supply you with the resulting KMZ file and they’ll submit it to Google for you so that it’ll appear in Google Earth in the main “3D Buildings” layer. For $99, they’ll do a single building that’s composed of 50 faces or less; more than enough for most individual buildings. You simply take photos of your building, upload them through their site and give them a few days to turn it around. I had them do my house so I could see how the process worked. It’s a simple model, but they did a nice job with it. Along with the basic house, they added things like the front porch, back deck and the chimney.

They also provide you with an embed code so you can show the building off on your own website via the Google Earth API. This means users of your website will be able to navigate around the model in 3D, right in their web browser. The embedded result works like the examples on their portfolio page : If you have a model that you need done, we highly recommend you check them out.