Texturing A Model Using Street View Images

EDIT: Newer versions of SketchUp now integrate Street View Texturing which saves a lot of steps!

This model is the first I ever tried using Google Street View for textures. It was actually pretty easy to do. used free Google Picasa photo editing software as an image capture tool. All you do is have Street View open in either Google Maps or Google Earth, and press the "PrtScn" key on your keyboard (I'm using a PC, maybe Macs are different) to capture the screen image.

Then it's just a matter of applying these images to the faces of your model, and refining them.

For further refinement, I used three handy functions in SketchUp 7. One is "Combine Textures" which allows you to create new textures by combining adjacent ones on your model. Another is "Make Unique Texture" which cuts away all the excess photograph floating unseen beyond the edges of your model (stuff like the sky, cars, trees, etc.) It just leaves the portion you need, which is to say the wall. The third tool is "Edit Texture" which sends the texture to an external editor of your choice, for example Photoshop, where you can tweak it, remove power lines and birds and whatever else. Then it automatically re-loads your edited image right back on to the same face in your model.

All these tools can be found in SketchUp in the context menu by right-clicking on a face in the model.