All at Sea – Google 3D Warehouse and Lumion
Lumion is a 3D engine for rapid visualisation, it allows models to be quickly imported and integrated within more complex scenes.
One of its strong points is support for the COLLADA – COLLAborative Design Activity file format for interactive 3D applications file format, allowing models to be easily exported from Google SketchUp. As a quick test of its capabilities we headed over to the Google 3D Warehouse and downloaded three models of iconic London buildings. By simply importing into SketchUp and then exporting in .dae (COLLADA) we were able to create the following movie:
The clip was created with the free version of Lumion, it really has never been easier to create rapid visualisations, the next step is to import various other data sources to create a more informative output.