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Finding What You're Looking Forīefore getting into the specifics for downloading stuff from the 3D Warehouse, it's worthwhile to take a look at some of the best ways of finding what you're looking for in the first place. In much the same way that you might search YouTube for the music video of "I'm on a boat" and instead somehow end up watching the stop-motion LEGO version that some guy filmed in his living room, the open-source nature of the 3D Warehouse often makes it a bit of a hit-or-miss proposition when you're trying to find useful content for a project. Of course, you'll also find loads of beautifully detailed models of the characters from Halo, Battlestar Galactica, Transformers, as well as everything you'd need to create 3D contingency plans for an apocalyptic zombie attack. Amidst this vast sea of content in the Warehouse, you'll find the 3D georeferenced buildings that appear in Google Earth's 3D Buildings layer, as well as hundreds of manufacturer-specific product catalogs containing hundreds of thousands of real-world products. The Warehouse contains millions of 3D models that include just about everything (PG-rated, of course) you could ever imagine wanting to see in 3D. When I meet someone who's never heard of the Google 3D Warehouse, I'll often describe it as the "YouTube for 3D models." The Google 3D Warehouse ( ) is a freely accessible Web-based service that allows anyone to upload or download 3D models in SketchUp (.skp), Google Earth (.kmz), or Collada (.dae) file formats.
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Learn More Buy Getting Models from the Google 3D Warehouse
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