Last year I hoofed it around the shoreline of Chicago here in the states, taking reference photos for this piece here. Though it was a rather cold day, and snow on the ground I gathered over 700 images. Not all of them were rock stars, but still a great variety of urban reference and textures.
I have bundled 120 of the better ones from that day and have include them here for you. These are not treated, corrected or even looked at by photoshop, but if you are need a parking meter reference, interesting scene to model, or referencing a building facade this package is great for that. It contains some skyline views, grungy photos, some interesting shapes and general cityscape photos.

Chicago Reference Pack by Wes Burke is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at wesburke.com.

















Thank you for sharing these pictures. It will be a great help and bunch of ideas for my architecture modeling exercices practice and training in Blender.
Thanks Wes. There is beautiful old architectural’s buildings in Chicago with nice textures.
For those who wants to try their Blender architectural skills with some of this pictures, you should check the properties of the photography before —> RMB on the picture, “Properties”, tab “Summary” then “Advanced >>”.
You should find there all the useful informations as the focal lenght,etc..
Very cool. Thanks, Wes!
Reference Packs… That’s good! Like CG Stock Cookies.
Cool cool, thanks.
Welcome guys, I really want to get back and do the Architectural tour or hoof it around the inside of the city. Some pretty kick-arse visuals, but perhaps I will wait until it is warmer. Currently about 7F here.
I live in a city of baroque, some gothic style and nearby romanic style architecture, which to a large extent would probably be suitable for sculpting, too. Also lots of sculptures around, very good work for the largest part. In case anybody were interested, I could dig through my archives and see what I can find. The quality sometimes isn’t great, did a lot of it 5 years ago with my first DSLR, but sure good enough for reference in that style, which is, imo, being severely neglected these days. But also way harder to model
I don’t think anyone would be opposed to that
If you are willing to pack a few of them up and send them over via the contribute page I have no doubt many people would find them useful!
That definitely would be awesome to see. Send what you have over and will have our robots comb through them.
Thanks! This is an awesome reference!
@Corniger – Yeah, could be nice to see these gothic style’s architectures.
They are always plenty of details in it.
Thanks in advance.
Thank you! Best wishes for ’10!
Just what I needed. Cheers!