How can I plot 3D surfaces in Google Earth?

Question

I am currently trying to plot 3D planes in Google Earth and stumbled over different approaches, but none of them are described well. I was wondering if anybody could describe a senseful approach to create planes in Google Earth, which might include a slope of the plane, which means that they would be 3D. How can I approach this problem?

Answer 1

There are two basic ways you can create 3D polygons for visualization in Google Earth - elevated KML polygons and 3D Models.

Using KML polygons, you can define the altitude of each vertex of the polygon. This allows you to create a triangle with a specific slope angle, or a more complex polygon with one or many faces & angles. Note that the KML drawing/creation tools in Earth will not let you create these directly (they only let you apply one altitude to ALL vertices of a polygon, to raise/lower it), so you'll need to create the relevant KML polygons manually or programmatically with some other tool.

The other option is 3D models (colada format), which is more flexible, in that you can create more complex shapes including overhangs, etc. The tradeoff is that 3D models also need to be created outside of Earth (eg: in Sketchup), and currently can only be viewed in Earth Pro (not Earth for web or mobile).

Hopefully that gets you on the right track. The KML documentation should have info on both of those options, but let us know if you get stuck or need more details.