I decided to try and recreate Laird to the best of my abilities (which for now means no columns.) I also could not find a historical photo of the backside of Laird, so for now, the (unshown) backside of Laird does not have a texture.
In my photo match I used these three photos:
All images courtesy of the Carleton College Digital Archives.
For the head on angle of the front of the building I couldn’t use photo match, as there were no “sides” I could map in 3D, only the front, and trying to use photo match resulted in strange distortions. So, to that end, I cropped in around just the building in the corresponding image and used that modified image to create a texture I drew in onto the front face. From there I pulled forward the front columns to match with the top down map. The roof layer came from the geo location reference.
My final product looked like this:
which, while not perfect, does invoke the identity of “Laird” in a basic box model for anyone who knows the building.
Did you have any challenges or troubles creating the model on Sketchup? For me personally I had troubles when I forgot to align the axis with the corners of the building. Sometimes I would forget and neglect this small but important detail and my focus line step would mess up because the axis would not be in the correct orientation.
Sometimes the images would skew and warp even when photo align “appeared” to be correct. Might have been me being off by a few crucial degrees, but eventually I got things working well enough to take screenshots.