I chose to match photos of Goodsell Observatory to the model and this task turned out more difficult that I had anticipated partially because of my poor decision at first. I first chose to create the actual model of the observatory based on the top down photo.
I basically drew circles and rectangles and pulled them from the ground and created a design that looks plausible to the observatory. And then, based on the model, I tried to match the rest of the images of the observatory that I had found from the library archives.
It could be just me, but it was extremely difficult aligning the model the to images so that I could not match the last image from the above. Maybe, I think I should have created a model based on the one from. Also, one mistake that I made was that when I was pulling objects, I did not take height too much into account… The results look as below
The top view is the one that resembles the most because it is the one that is made off from the top view screenshot taken from the Google map.
The base model itself looks really good – despite the wonky texturing I could instantly recognize it as Goodsell from the side image (#3). Did you try to match the black and white photo to your model and it stretched instead?
Sketchup seems to have issues to stretching and exposing flat 2D pictures on top of curved and cylindrical objects (it treats them as if they were flat), this can be seen in both the”CMC” model and this one. I wonder if there is a trick to superimposing on a curved surface…
I wouldn’t feel bad about the wonky textures at all – the base model looks incredibly true to life and detailed and I’m going to confess I hadn’t figured out how to make cylindrical/spherical shapes work this well yet, but I plan on studying your post.