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Originally Posted by freerover
Thanks for sending! It's been fun seeing all the angles. Can you add the Burj Dubai to downtown just for fun?
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I've done that before just for fun, yeah. You can add your own models. I've even played around with it and put a high rise in my neighborhood just to see what the views would be like. To do it, you use the "add pologon" tab in Google Earth. Fly over to wherever it is you're wanting to add your model. For a square or rectangular model, all you have to do is put down 4 dots. You don't have to drag your cursor. If you do that it'll make your model look crazy. Just put down 4 dots and shape it whatever you want. If you want it to be triangular, then you only need 3 dots. Once you place a dot, it will open box with a bunch of options - description, color, view, altitude, and measurements. To scale the height, you need put in a number under the altitude tab. It uses the metric system, by the way. There's also a scroll down menu that will say "clamped to ground". You want to click on that and select "relative to ground" because that will attach your model to the countour of the sea level elevation of that site. You also want to check the "extend sides to ground" box. And last, put in your height. So if it's a 500 foot model, you'd put in 152.4 as the height. You can also change the color to whatever you want even after you've created the model. Don't forget to save it under the file tab under "save my places". You can also create folders to make different model sets. I have models for a bunch of cities, not just Austin, so I wanted multiple folders so that I didn't have models of other cities showing up in my Austin folder.
It took me a while to figure it out, but once I did it was a lot of fun to play around with. When I added a model equal to the height of Burj Dubai, I was shocked that I could see it from the top of my street with a lot of ease. You can also view these models in the streetview version in Google Earth. So you don't only have to fly around. It's useful in determining where a skyline view might pop up from or if you're interested in seeing what a building might look like on the skyline from your favorite view.