Regarding elevation modeling, as SketchUp does this with �lan, it would be cool to have a way to extract the GE terrain data for a 3D construction site, which would open as a heightfield or tessellated terrain in SketchUp. Then anything built on this stand-in terrain would export correctly at absolute altitude to GE.

If you can't extract the data directly, there may be workarounds. You can't control the lighting in GE, or else I would suggest the synthetic normals map method. But you can take a stereogram of a gridded overlay and automatically analyze the parallax to generate a height field. Or you could program a raster scan of the cursor and read the altitude data into a file. It's too bad the placemarks don't contain elevation data the way they show lat and long.

If I were doing this manually, I'd place a 100 x 100 grid overlay on a 3D construction site and read off the elevations at the grid points by moving the cursor over them, one by one. Then I could build the terrain model in SketchUp. What I'm suggesting is some way to automate the process.

Just thoughts.

SMcQ