Google Earth street-view 3d objects

jarlrmai

Senior Member.
I am trying to recreate a scene in Google Earth to show the relative locations of structures to investigate this thread


Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1no5w5o/ufo_sighting_at_uniontown_mall_pa/


I placed a polygon at the nearby road sign and at the suspected building location

In the ground-level view they all show, but in the street-view mode only the the closest sign view shows, no matter what height I set the others to, is there some setting I am missing?

1758622434529.png


1758622468920.png
 
I find the same problem when trying to show flight paths in Street View. It glitches and only shows "through" the Street View image in certain positions and zoom levels. I haven't found a way round it, so I will be interested to know if anyone else has.
 
In my experience, street-view has essentially a radius of a few hundred meters and then what you see is just an image, so any 3D model is cut off if it's further away.
 
In my experience, street-view has essentially a radius of a few hundred meters and then what you see is just an image, so any 3D model is cut off if it's further away.
I just did some experiments, and it seems to be 1000m. I think it's still drawing the polygons, but the street view image is "closer" to the camera (like it's drawing it on a sphere of radius 1000m), so the z-buffer hides the polygons.

And this does not seem to be configurable, so it would be very difficult to change.
 
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A kind-of workaround I use quite often is to take a screenshot of the Street View, then without moving the camera, switch to the 3D ground-level view (which shows the objects/tracks) and take another screenshot, then overlay them and use partial transparency to show both.

Like this:

1758872438044.png


In this case there were 3D building models present, so you get a lot of overlap, but you can do it when there aren't.
 
A kind-of workaround I use quite often is to take a screenshot of the Street View, then without moving the camera, switch to the 3D ground-level view (which shows the objects/tracks) and take another screenshot, then overlay them and use partial transparency to show both.
I sometimes use Select/Sky, and then delete the sky, which mostly avoids the messy overlay.
2025-09-26_05-40-34.jpg


Here it is with about 50% transparency
2025-09-26_05-42-39.jpg
 
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