Article Number: 62 | VC6 | VC5 | VC4 | VC3 | VCPS | Post Date: May 15, 2018 | Last Updated: April 13, 2024
In one of your advertisement videos, I saw that you covered up vehicles that were in your Google Earth aerial. You also made a road sign from Google Street View. How did you do that?
METHOD 1 | Copy Albedo Texture | VC6
In Virtual CRASH 6, images in your project can be copied directly onto the Windows clipboard using the “copy albedo texture” button and pasted into any image manipulation application such as Photoshop. Once cleaned and recopied to the clipboard, they can be pasted back into Virtual CRASH 6 using the “paste albedo texture” button (see Chapter 23 of the VC6 User’s Guide). This workflow is illustrated below.
METHOD 2 | Screen capture | VC5, VC4, VC3, and VCPS
Below we review the process of masking vehicles and creating road signs from Google Street View.
The ad video is shown below.
For this example, it took less than a minute to cover up the vehicles. Below we see our aerial photos imported using the Google Earth tool. Unfortunately, there was a lot of traffic at the time the aerials were taken. We wanted to clean this up before proceeding.
First, we turned off the grid lines in Virtual CRASH. Then, in the top-down ortho view mode, we zoomed into a portion of our scene that contained a clean area of road. Then we took a screenshot of our display using ctrl+print screen. This was then pasted into Paint (Paint comes with Windows). With the image in Paint, we can now use the “Select” tool to lasso the area we’d like to use as our cover-up image. We selected a representative patch of road that matched up well to the whole scene.
Press the “Crop” button to remove everything but your selected area.
Save the image file. Next, using either Project > Import, or by dragging and dropping, insert the image into your scene.
The scale of the image will be arbitrary. Rescale the image section using the scale tool, or just using the grips to stretch and resize the image as needed. Remember, you can translate and rotate image files using your mouse as well. You can also make the image semi-transparent to help scale and place it in the scene.
Finally, clone the image as many times as needed and positioned the clone images. Enable the “use copy” option before cloning to decouple the parent image from the cloned image, in case you need to adjust the size of the individual image tiles (learn more about the clone tool here: http://www.vcrashusa.com/kb-vc-article50).
Repeating the process, we achieved the desired result.
Creating the road sign
Using a similar method, we created the road sign by first examining the scene in Google Street View. A screen capture of the browser window was pasted into Paint.
The region of interest was selected using the “Select” tool and image was cropped.
The image file was saved, and the sign object was created using the steps illustrated in this Knowledge Base post: http://www.vcrashusa.com/kb-vc3-article7.
Tags: Masking vehicles, covering up vehicles, cover up, hide vehicles, clean up aerial, delete vehicles.
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