Google Earth And Autocad -

The next morning, she sent the KMZ file to the historical society. She didn't write a long report. She just wrote: "Go to the off-ramp at exit 47. Open this in Google Earth on your phone. Stand in the real place and look at your screen."

Mira imported the DXF into a blank drawing. The foundation was there, a set of white lines on a black infinite void. She rotated the drawing so true north aligned with the site. Then she began the resurrection.

And somewhere in the cloud, AutoCAD and Google Earth shook hands over a job neither could have done alone. google earth and autocad

Mira spun the view. She tilted the angle so she was looking south toward the sawtooth roof. She zoomed down to ground level, where the loading dock would have been. In her mind, she heard the rattle of looms, the hiss of steam, the shouts of children running for scraps.

She worked until 2 a.m., the glow of her monitor the only light in the room. And then she did something she rarely did. She exported the AutoCAD model to SketchUp, then imported it into Google Earth as a . The next morning, she sent the KMZ file

For years, Mira had been an archaeologist of the invisible. Her specialty wasn't digging with a trowel, but stitching together the ghost layers of a city using two very different pieces of software: Google Earth and AutoCAD.

But the magic wasn't in the modeling. It was in the layering . Open this in Google Earth on your phone

From the old photograph, she knew the sawtooth roof faced south for optimal light. She drew a single clerestory profile, then arrayed it twenty times. She extruded walls from the foundation lines, guessing the brick thickness from the width of the shadow in the 2002 imagery. The water tower was a cylinder with a flared top—she lofted it from three ellipses. The loading dock became a 3D solid, its canopy supported by columns she copied from a mill in a neighboring town that was still standing.