Printing Google

Two years ago when the City of Jacksonville, FL approached Sweet Onion Creations (Bozeman, MT; www.sweetonioncreations.com) about building a 1:1800 scale version of the town, co-founder Jake Cook knew the project went beyond most CAD apps the garage-based company could afford.

But looking at the Florida town, Cook observed, “All this stuff is on Google 3D Warehouse and we started playing around with it and eventually built out the whole city.” “Instead of paying anyone to CAD this up, if you can use Google Earth to download the image, it’s obviously less expensive.”

3D Warehouse (http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse) is Google’s seemingly endless repository of cities, historical sites, stadiums and buildings, mostly pulled from Google Earth (http://earth.google.com). Being Google, it’s all easily integrated with SketchUp (http://sketchup.google.com), Google’s drawing tool for creating and sharing 3D models. Sweet Onion completed the 7- x 4-ft. Jacksonville model using a ZPrinter 310 System from Z Corporation (www.ww.zcorp.com) in early 2008 and posted a blurb on their blog detailing how they did it. Literally the next day Google SketchUp came knocking with a request for a 3D print of their new headquarters in Boulder, CO, from a SketchUp file.

The Google apps have some limitations, says Cook, who has relied on Materialise Magic RP software to clean up SketchUp files and firm up walls so they’re solid enough for RP builds.