And best of all, it doesn't have to be highly detailed!

I'm actually in the pre-production stages of a very demanding independent "FX heavy" project.  The major scene stealer in the film will require a completely 3D Manhattan, NY model.  We plan on modeling lower Manhattan ourselves; however, I need an accurate model right now for animatics (which is why it doesn't need to be highly detailed -- just accurate).  I want to start on these animatics as soon as possible, which is why I don't want to waist time modeling a low-res version myself.

Btw, I primarily use Max 8, but also have Poser 6 which will work for animatic purposes as well.  I tried searching the forums, but didn't find much.

Thanks!

*The major scene stealer in the film will require a completely 3D Manhattan, NY model.

  What is a 3d Manhattan???   Are you saying Streets or apartments, neighborhood...

  are you saying a 3D model of the Manhattan Island it self...!   as in an aerial view...?

are you offering money for undertaking such a project..?

Attached Link: Dystopia

I'd suggest you check out Google Earth. It has some fairly elaborate 3-D models of real locations. I don't have it installed, though, so I can't check on lower Manhattan.

You can't export geometry directly from Google Earth, but there is a hack you can use to get geometry out of it into a format Poser can use. It's called Ogle and it can 'snatch" the meshes from any app that uses OpenGL as its rendering engine (as Google Earth does.)

Guess that means it won't work in Vista, though. Good luck

Google earth shows satellite pictures of the entire planet not 3d models....  I got it...  unless you're speaking of another section or program...  Maybe they have on their site 3d models I have never seen... 

In Google Earth you can switch on the 3D buildings, they are not on by default. And the entire New York is modelled, but these are very very low polygon models, but they are accurate enough fro a previz set-up.

Yeah Google Earth is perfect for previz, and I could also use it as a blueprint to set up a higher detailed model.  I'm going to check out Ogle and see what I can do.  I already visited the page and it looks way beyond me (I'm not good with coding), so I'm still open to more suggestions if there are any alternatives... but for now I'll see what I can do.  Thanks for the help to everyone!

I stand corrected...  Google earth does contain 3d models of cities..  and of NYC.   low res but impressive job....

My understanding is that you don't need to do any coding to use Ogle. You do need to hand edit some configuration files (ini files) but that's not the same as writing code or scripting. And maybe not even that (see step 7 below.)

You do need to d/l and install another app called GLIntercept that Ogle uses to grab the scene. These two apps run while you are viewing a 3-D scene in a third app like Google Earth.

The instructions are as follows:

1. Download and install GLIntercept 0.5 from http://glintercept.nutty.org/download.html
2. Read all of its documentation, and make sure it works... There's a bunch of technical stuff here which is directed at coders, but it's basically troubleshooting to make sure GLIntercept is working. If you are non-technical you can just skip it and hope for the best.
3. If you do not already have it, download the compiled OGLE plugin from http://ogle.eyebeamresearch.org/download/ (note: you want the most recent .bin``. distribution, not the src).
4. Copy the whole OGLE distribution (i.e. the directory that contains the OGLE.dll file) into the Plugins directory for your GLIntercept installation, typically
   C:Program FilesGLIntercept0_5Plugins, and rename the directory to OGLE``ogle_* to OGLE). (i.e. change the name from
5. That's it, installed! To use it...
6. Most of the work in getting OGLE to capture 3D data is in the configuration of GLIntercept. There are a number of settings that must be made to ensure OGLE functions properly.... they then list a bunch of settings you have to change, but it's ll right there, just do what they say on the website.
7. Here's a big help: The OGLE GUI: Someone has put together a Windows GUI app that supposedly makes all this copying and configuring a lot easier. You can try it at your own risk at: http://members.chello.at/alexan/ and give the creator feedback on the SourceForge forum.
8. Run your OpenGL application with GLIntercept configured to use the OGLE plugin (as seen above).
9. When you get to the view of the geometry that you want to capture, activate frame logging using whatever keystrokes you have configured with the LogPerFrame::FrameStartKeys variable. (This is one of the settings in the GLConfig.ini file you have to edit. The GUI probably lets you set this also.)
10. Be patient -- your app will freeze and it can take a number of seconds or minutes for GLIntercept to log all of the data for that frame and OGLE to generate the 3D object file for the on-screen geometry. You will know that it is done when your application becomes interactive again.
11. Find the .obj file in the directory where your application runs. Open it in...

POSER of course!

The above is my "lite" version of the instructions found on this page:
http://ogle.eyebeamresearch.org/readme

Doesn't actually sound too hard... :)  I'll give it a shot tomorrow when I'm back home, and let you guys know how things went.

Thanks!