Google Earth 3D buildings

[yanpa]

This is probably old hat, but I was playing around with Google Earth and noticed they've got 3-d representations of many buildings, at least in the central area of major cities. I'm still boggling at how much detail is shown, presumably they've had the equivalent of a Street View car flying around?

[Coligny]

Dood, even toyohashi have all the buildings (non textured thought)

Terrain matching mode for doppler radar navigation being quite old i'm pretty sure that back in the days 3d mapping was done by KH1x sat and is now a bottom of the spec sheet ability for commercial radar sats...

[BigInJapan]

This is probably old hat, but I was playing around with Google Earth and noticed they've got 3-d representations of many buildings, at least in the central area of major cities. I'm still boggling at how much detail is shown, presumably they've had the equivalent of a Street View car flying around?

A lot of the buildings visible in Google Earth are automatically generated. However, many, if not all of the buildings with textures have been manually created (by users). Google has a simple tool called Building Maker that anyone can use to create 3D buildings using the images available in Google Earth. It works alright for square skyscrapers etc., but not so good for houses and the like.
If you want to create houses and other irregular shaped objects on Google Earth (I've put a koban, drugstore, bridge, and vegetable stand to name a few), you'll need to use Google Sketchup.
The following tutorial is for Building Maker:

[Coligny]

i think sketchup has been resold by google... there was rumors on slasdot few month ago.
Did you add Greiji's goats boneyard ?