Why can't I get GE Tour Builder to allow me to pan/tilt/zoom for a location?

[Mason Miller]

Hello GE Education Community,

I wrote recently about a project I'm working on to develop a public GE-based virtual tour of a Cold War-era missile testing site here in the US. 

In my novice mind, I pictured my workflow being to build the tour using Tour Builder (set the tour stops, add supporting photos and videos, etc.) and then tweak the resulting KML a bit to polish it up as best as I could to make it compatible with GE for Web. 

I'm following the published tutorial by Google that includes instructions on setting the proper view for each tour stop using the standard pan/tilt/zoom functions. For the life of me, I can't figure out why those functions don't work in Tour Builder. I can only establish direct overhead views (from whatever altitude I choose) or Street View. Some of the locales have Street View imagery, but some don't but the topography is neat enough that I'd like to have an oblique angle view. 

Has anyone else run into this problem where Tour Builder won't allow pan/tilt/zoom (I guess "tilt" in particular)? Is there some trick I'm not aware of? 

Thank you all for your time in looking at this and for any insights you might be able to offer.

Sincerely,
Mason

[Josh Williams]

Hey there Mason,

I don't think the tilt/pan has worked for a bit of time now. 

How much were you planning on 'tweek'ing the resulting KML? 

There are a couple of ways you can change the view.

Via Earth on Desktop (easy)

1. Open Earth Tour file via Earth for Desktop

2. Go to marker

3. Get the camera where you like it.

4. Right click placemark in "Places" panel on the left

5. Click "Snapshot View"

6. Save as .kmz file

Documentation: https://www.google.com/earth/outreach/learn/using-views-and-perspectives-in-google-earth/

Via Text Editor (less than easy)

1. create a folder to save kml

2. Extract .kmz to .kml in new created folder

3. Open kml in text editor

4. manually change the <tile><heading> in <LookAt> or <Camera>

5. Save then zip back to kmz 

 

Josh

[Mason Miller]

Josh -

Thank you so much for being a wealth of assistance as I figure all of this stuff out. Whew! 

Your "Easy" instructions will probably suffice. That looks straight-forward enough.

As far as my plans for "tweaking" the kmz file. Honestly as little as possible. For instance, I was planning to change the logo on the bottom of the navigation pane to that of White Sands Missile Range. That sort of thing. I know a little html and a little sql-type coding but I'd rather not get under the hood too much. 

I will go with this and move things along!

Thank you very, very much!

Mason