Visualization of Historic Landscapes - Google SketchUp Workshop: Modeling, Visualizing, and Illustrating - page 278

The project was a volunteer project as a prototype for future projects.
The total time taken by the project was approximately 120 hours includ-
ing research and modeling. The final output is a georeferenced model for
private viewing in Google Earth and SketchUp.
Project Context
Historians and educators frequently encounter puzzles from the past. Vanished
historic landscapes are often full of mystery and intrigue. Although two-
dimensional photographs and maps can provide insight and understanding,
they lack a layer of realism that a three-dimensional model can provide. This
project uses SketchUp to push and pull the flat remnants of the past into a three-
dimensional, “living” model that can be used to analyze photographs and provide
insight into what life in this remote village of Byng Inlet must have once been like.
Historic Byng Inlet, located in Perry Sound, Ontario, was once a thriving indus-
trial town. The complex at Byng was at one time the second largest sawmill
in Canada, which employed several hundred workers while the town's overall
population was only 4200. At its peak, the village included a school, church,
general store, railroad depot, hotel, and even a modest movie theatre. Today,
the site is mostly abandoned, home to just a few families, and is primarily an
area widely known for sport fishing.
The Graves & Bigwood sawmill was built and completed by 1902. The mill
and its facilities covered over 1 square mile with a large lumber yard, green
lumber yard, planing mill, 11 wood-fired boilers for generating steam power,
and dock slips and a box factory close by. A massive mill fire that occurred
on May 20, 1912, saw losses in excess of over 55 million feet of lumber. The
Graves & Bigwood Company mill was rebuilt. In 1927, after the nearby sources
of lumber were depleted, the mill was closed down. Without any other form of
industry to keep the population employed, most of the people left the area. 1
This project took place entirely “in the cloud” of the Internet. There was a small
but substantial collection of photographs of Byng Inlet. You may notice that
the quality of some of the images used throughout the project is poor. This is
due to two factors: They are old photographs and do not have the resolution
we expect today from digital cameras. Second, the images were optimized for
Web delivery and viewing; although such low-resolution images are a detri-
ment to viewing in printed form, they are ideal for use inside SketchUp models.
Technical Aspects
SketchUp was used for the project because numerous built-in features of this
tool made the assembling of various parts of the re-creation quite easy. Terrain
data (TIN) was imported into SketchUp from Google Earth. The built-in ability of
1 http://www.ontarioabandonedplaces.com/bynginlet/byng2.asp.