Google Earth or Google Map Stitcher - A "Must Have" program.

There's been a lot of discussion on these forums in the past about stiching or joining Google Maps oe Google Earth images. Well some kind gentleman has just released a very small program that does all this automatically. The software doesn't need to be installed, in fact you can even run it from a memory stick. That in itself makes it worth a try.

Like any free software, it has its limitations, but it still works very well. I created a very large (48 inches square) photo of a railway yard in Australia and this allowed me to then pick any area and work from there. If you're playing around with Google Maps, or Google Earth, I strongly suggest you give this little program a try.

I've supplied a link to to the program and a three or four page tutorial which I wrote myself, in the Trainz Community Newsletter which has just been released. If you've already downloaded the Newsletter, then you already have the link and the tutorial. If you haven't, may I suggest you do so, because the program is a beauty and the Newsletter contains 24 pages of valuable Trainz information. The tutorial starts at around page 20.

The program only works with Google Maps, but the imagery is almost the same as Google Earth anyway.
Enjoy

Pardon my denseness But I don't get the concept of using Google Earth with Trainz. Please explain.

You use Google Earth Satellite imagery on your baseboards so that all the railway tracks, buildings and roads are in the right place if you're reconstructing a prototype railroad. Once done, you remove the image.

Look at this excellent example submitted to the 2010 Route Building Competition by Kiwairail. It's one the Competition Gallery web site.

Johnk said:

You use Google Earth Satellite imagery on your baseboards so that all the railway tracks, buildings and roads are in the right place if you're reconstructing a prototype railroad. Once done, you remove the image.

Look at this excellent example submitted to the 2010 Route Building Competition by Kiwairail. It's one the Competition Gallery web site.

Click to expand...

Will you be doing a tutoriat about getting the PNG file, on to the baseboard?
Is it hard to do?

j_maybury said:

Will you be doing a tutoriat about getting the PNG file, on to the baseboard?
Is it hard to do?

Click to expand...

It's very high on my agenda. I'll try to do one for the next newsletter, but I'm going away for three months in a week and my little Netbook won't run Trainz.

I'll ask Kiwirail if he can do the screenshots and I'll write the tutorial.

Keep in mind that the finished png may cover several baseboards and you may need to chop it up. But let's leave that for the Tutorial

Johnk said:

It's very high on my agenda. I'll try to do one for the next newsletter, but I'm going away for three months in a week and my little Netbook won't run Trainz.

I'll ask Kiwirail if he can do the screenshots and I'll write the tutorial.

Keep in mind that the finished png may cover several baseboards and you may need to chop it up. But let's leave that for the Tutorial

Click to expand...

thanks for the quick reply, I'll look forward to reading it.
have a nice holiday, hope you have good wether.:wave:

I use to capture screens from Google Maps or similar websites (for Italy, Yellow Pages have very detailed aerial photos), then I make a 720 x 720 metre plane in GMax, and clone it several times, using 720 x 720 metre portions of the images I capture as textures.

It is a very boring job, so I am eager to try Google Map Stitcher...

Last night, I tried to use Google Map Buddy to create an image of Staten Island, NY, and the program told me that it was creating over 1000 image files. When it was finished, it told me that there were problems with some image files and that over 900 image files were created. When I checked the large image file in Windows Photo Viewer, some parts of Staten Island was missing.

jeff, there could be several reasons for this. Please accept that my knowledge of the program involves the one session when I created the tutorial, so I'm hardly qualified to comment. However I will.

1,000 images is probably too many. In my tutorial I created 360, or one third your requirements. It created a 37 megabyte PNG image 48 inches square. I'm also running a reasonably powerful dual core processor and 4 gig of ram.

Using a very crude rule of thumb, your master PDF would be three times the size of mine: 110 megabytes and almost 12 ft square. At a guess, I would say you had serious memory issues while creating and rendering the image.

Also, Windows photo Viewer would be the absolute last program I would use to view the master image. I can't think of a single nice thing to say about that program other than I actually called it a program! Do yourself a great big favour and download IrfanView. it's compact, exceptionally powerful and very simple to use.

I'll be constantly writing tutorials for irfanView, in fact a few are already available on the Trainz Resources Directory. Click this link. Also enter IrfanView in the search box because there are other people's tutorials listed also.

Please try to reduce the size of your scanned area. You can always make several master images, but I'd try to keep each one to 40 meg (400 images) max. As I said, that's just an unqualified guess.

Also, 900 images may well be the limit. I have no way of knowing.

Please keep posting your findings - good or bad, and good luck.

John

I tried again with the area of NYCTA's Coney Island Yard. The program generated 343 image files without any problems. I can load the large image into Paint Shop Pro but I can't load small images into that program. I can load small images into Windows Photo Viewer.

I managed a 1600 image area last night. The reason it's failing for some people is more likely because it relies on the 'zoom factor' on google maps being constant, if the web app would display 'no image exists at this zoom level', then it'll skip those images.

Depending on area - especially so in the US where google maps is made of a mish-mash of sources - it's entirely possible to run into some areas where there is no image for a specific zoom level, yet images for the areas around it.

Hi Johnk. Just discovered this post. I downloaded the program, and its just what i need. I now have the area from Hornsby to Asquith as an image file. I agree with j_maybury, we definitely need to know how to make use of these files in trainz.

Great find mate.

The hardest part of the whole process, is getting the map image to a texture that is at the right scale. But I found that using a screenshot of the 'select area' portion of the program - where the scale is visible at the bottom left, with the rectangular area selected still active - helped greatly. Basically, I loaded it into an image analysis program that allows you to draw lines and it tell you the actual size of the line in real world units (you need the scale for this, to calibrate it).

Once I'd done that, It was trivial to do a bit of maths to work out that my grabbed area was 500m (lucky!) x 615m, and from there, I just needed to double up the area in the image file horizontally - keeping the aspect ratio - which gave me a 1km x 1230m area. At this point, I crop the image to 1km to 1km (fairly easy, since I just had to make sure that I crop the vertical portion to the same dimension in pixels to the horizontal).

At this point, I have a 1km x 1km map image, and all I need is to make it a 'power of 2' size, in my case I chose 2048x2048, and saved it as a .jpg overwriting the '1km basemap a.jpg' image in a clone of the '1km basemap A' asset.

That's all the hard part done - now you just create your route area, or load it, and place the basemap asset you created, and draw tracks/whatnot over the top

If you've gotten all your maths right, you end up with the rails aligning properly as you place them, with the rails in the satellite image, and you end up with something like shown at this image:

Full Image

Thumbnail (it's a big image)



The hardest part, really, is working out the scale, and thus real-world size of your initial google maps area.

Btw, I'd be impressed if anyone can recognise which station it is


Nikki.

Nikki, I haven't got a clue what station it is, but I need you on my team mate! I really do appreciate you input, and Guys, I'm really delighted with all your positive comments, even if they've been in the face of adversity.

Vulcan from Ianz Trainz has just posted me a nice little tutorial on getting the maps to a baseboard, but I haven't had a chance to have a good look at it yet.

I'm happy to send it to any of you (around 3 meg) if we can work together to create a "Super Tutorial" on this interesting aspect of Trainz. I'm not sure what method you use Nikki, but it may be different than Ian's. I'm so impressed with how far you've advanced and your willingness to share. I've been a bit jaded lately, but your contribution to this thread has given me a real boost. That doesn't mean I've forgotten everyone else, but this is the first thread I've created where there has been such a positive reaction.

I'm actually a bit overwhelmed.

Let's keep it happening.

PM me if you want an early copy of the Tutorial. It's in Word format.

John

Vulcan from Ianz Trainz has kindly supplied a link to a PDF version of his Google Earth/Trainz Baseboard tutorial:

http://www.ianztrainz.com.au/UsingGoogleEarth.zip

Ian worked for Auran a few years back and he's an accomplished Trainz modeller. His site is one evey Trainzer should visit not only to see what he's done, but also to see how it's done.

Hre's a link to his site:

http://www.ianztrainz.com.au/

Please don't forget to share you experiences with the program or Ianz tutorial.

Thanks.

John

Also remember that bing provides some valuable imagery too - just today I decided to view the bing satellite and aerial maps of the area I'm modelling, and noticed that there was an extra siding that I hadn't spotted in the satellite view, that aerial view - because of its lower viewpoint - highlighted in a different light.

Bing's aerial view is also useful for seeing buildings that are merely outlines on google's satellite views.

Yes, Google is still using images that are now older than a few people on this forum. It's indeed possible that some of Bing's images are more modern. They have an interesting way of creating 3D buildings, but I wonder if anything is distorted as a result.

As a matter of interest. Where I live the Google iimage is high res and about 18 months old. The image next to it which is about 200 metres down the street, is low res and at least six years old.

Hi John,

Thank you very much for this information. I like to follow this thread. It's amazing and can be very helpful buiding a route !

Greetings, raildriver1

I like the topic John, been using it for a few years now.
It really gives you the best routes.
I even combine it with Google streetview, when it comes to detailing.

Heres a few from the route im working on now.

Welcome aboard guys and thanks for the comments. If you can help with tips and tricks, or if anyone else wants to ask a question, we have a few people with some experience in the group now.

Regards,

John