Using Photos to Model Façades

With a photo of a building, you can create a remarkably realistic model. This tutorial shows you how to do so.

Model of house fronts on a plaza

In this tutorial, you will model two house fronts, based on photos of buildings in the plaza of Monpazier, a 13th-century bastide (fortified town) in Dordogne. The illlustration shows these houses, along with two others (in the actual plaza, the houses occupy different positions).

You use each photo both to construct the façade and to texture it. In a way, you are “reverse engineering” the original architecture. Each house is constructed as an Editable Poly object: You will use various polygon-editing tools to give the façade depth so it can cast realistic shadows, and then use the Unwrap UVW modifier to adjust the texture and improve the model’s appearance.

TipIf you are not familiar with using the Material Editor and texture-mapping modifiers, you might want to go through the Materials And Mapping tutorials first, then return to this tutorial.

WarningThe techniques used in this tutorial are suitable for modeling architecture and other stationary objects. They aren’t suitable for modeling organic meshes, especially ones that you want to animate by using a feature such as the Skin modifier or Physique. In this tutorial, we create irregular meshes that include multisided polygons. A deformable mesh, by contrast, should contain only square or triangular polygons of fairly uniform size (if you plan to turn the mesh into a subdivision surface by using the HSDS modifier, then it should contain only square polygons before you apply HSDS).

See Modeling an Airplane for an example of mesh modeling with more-or-less regular polygons.

Skill level: Intermediate

Time to complete: 3 hours

Preparation for This Tutorial

If you have not already downloaded the tutorial files (MAX scenes and other assets), download them now and unzip them into a project folder called \Autodesk 3ds Max 2011 tutorials. See Where to Find Tutorial Files.
On the Quick Access toolbar, click (Project Folder) and set your current project to Autodesk 3ds Max 2011 Tutorials.

Some Pointers: Preparing a Photo Before You Use It to Build a Model

This section explains how to prepare photos for use in the kind of façade modeling the tutorial demonstrates. You might want to read it if you plan to take your own photos (or scans) to use in a similar way. Or you might want to skip this section, do the tutorial itself, and then read this material later.

In a photograph, as in the human eye, parallel lines appear to converge. But to create a façade in 3ds Max, horizontal lines should be horizontal, and vertical lines should be vertical. So you will almost always need to use a graphic editing program, such as Photoshop, to adjust the photo before you use it as a texture.

For example, here is the original photo used to create “Façade 4,” the second building you construct in the tutorial:

Superimposing guidelines on the house, shows that the groundline is horizontal, and the left side is close to vertical, but that the right side needs adjusting:

Using a perspective-correction or “distortion” tool, lets you align the sides of the house to the guides:

NotePerspective-correction or “perspective-control” lenses are available to eliminate the vertical, or “third” vanishing point, and make the vertical sides of a building appear parallel. But such a lens is a specialized, expensive piece of equipment.

A view camera, which uses a bellows for the body, can be set to accomplish perspective correction, too. But view cameras are not in widespread use, these days.

A photo editor has other uses. In this example, we wanted to remove the little girl standing in the archway:

... Which is easy to do with most such programs:

The final step is to crop the image to the dimensions of the house itself:

This final image becomes the bitmap used to construct and to texture the house in Modeling the Second House.

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