I am trying to determine the best workflow for importinat 3D terrain data into Sketchup for land planning. I have a SketchUp component representing a house that I want to place numerous instances of, at grade, and analyze view impacts of existing buildings captured in Pix4D. I have experimented briefly with plugins from SimlabSoft for importing .OBJ and .FBX files. I have also been able to import contour files in .DWG format. The contour lines are the lightest weight method, but lack the photo realism of .OBJ and .FBX. The subject area is ~100 acres, and I have up to 1,000 images from P4P that can be analyzed to varying details. As I learn the best Pix4D processing parameters (trading off runtime for resolution and file size), I am curious what best practices are to using the 3D terrain data for land planning. Someone out there must be a black belt in this space. Also, I am not necesarily wed to SketchUp as the land planning tool, if there are better apps out there that don’t have a huge learning curve. The tutorial videos on SketchUp have me thinking it’s a good fit for what I want to do.
Kelly