I've been back to the drawing board with this model, and overhauled it.

It can be downloaded for viewing in GEv4 via the original placemark here .



Main changes are:

New east and west ends. Notably the 4 octagonal (previously square) towers.

Removed all black outline edges. This got rid of some of the jittery effect the first model had, and resulted in a 400k smaller file.

Transparent windows.

My own material textures for the stonework. Basically, snippets of photographs of the building, lightly edited in MS Paint so they tile without noticible boundaries.

I've also attempted to pull out more contrast between the colours. Though, the Google Earth darkening effect largely cancels this out.

The new file size is 3.7MB, of which 2.5MB is the 3D Collada model file, and 1.2MB, jpeg images.

Interestingly, I found when exported using the previous SketchUp exporter (without textures) filesize is only 1.6MB. I guess Collada files are less (zip) compressable than the old kml files (?)

James


P.S. good news for texture modelers, just noticed the forums now accept file attachments of up to 20MB (previously 5MB).