Hello Forum, I want to create an animation for an advertisement of a company. For that purpose my boss wants the house of the company displayed and a nice camera zoom to it. Actually he described it as having a zoom like from Google Earth but with better quality. This seems pretty challenging to me, because that would mean to model the companies house (which is already quite challenging) but also the environment. Although I know how to model using Maya I also know how much work that is. An idea would be an automatic creation of the house. Like shooting a lot of fotos and using a software that generates a 3d-model of this. Can anyone recommend good software for that kind of purpose? The less expensive the better. Any ideas for solving this problem helps me out... Cheers.

Well, you could look into Google Earth professional and doing some digital clean up. Google Earth Pro provides some pretty high quality imagery. The question is just how much better quality is he asking though. It is $400.

There's Canoma, but as you say, it'd be a big job.

Maybe generous use of motion blur would give a showy enough effect but make the details less important?

You mean like this?

Do they definately want a 3D animation? Here's an After Effects tutorial - http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/earth_zoom/

Thank you for all your answers. Especially the last tutorial is a nice hint. We actually chose to model the most important stuff. Well, if they pay me, I'll do it :)