In this Blender 2.5 video tutorial we go through a fun modeling exercise by modeling a building from a single reference. Due to not have any head-on views of the building we model everything by eyeballing it, using some techniques to best approximate the actual dimensions. By the end of the tutorial we’re left with a model that could easily be used as a game asset or as a base for much more highly detailed building model.
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Discussion
64 Responses to “Modeling a Building”Leave a Comment
I’m so stoked! I’ve been looking for something like this!
Finally! Thanks for making an architectural VT Jonathan! been waiting for this for a while now =) And hoping for more
BTW Merry Christmas !
Jonathan did a very interesting “unwrapping building” tutorial published here on march 26th if you didn’t get it already
Great!! I was waiting for it looooong time! THANK YOU!!
Jonathan, another great tutorial. I was also waiting for such one. It would be a great lesson to texture it and maybe to render it inside of LuxRender
Hi there. Yet another cool tutorial.
What could be very interesting for this kind of scene, is a camera-mapping tutorial.
I think that blender’s camera settings are really weird and not really coherent with real cameras values.
So, if you have a good technique to acheive camera mapping (for inserting the model in a real photo for ex.), that would be excellent.
Thx again for your work, merry christmas.
Thanks Jonathan ! I love architectural tuts. I hope you will post more of them after the holidays.
Merry Christmas !
I need more skills to keep it up with you guys.
Just keep them coming… I catch up next year
Merry Christmas and a Happy new year
Hi Jonathan,
You are the master when the subject is modeling, congratulations!!!
If someone wants to know another great tutorial made by another genius called Andrew Price, go to the link below:
http://www.blenderguru.com/high-rise-building/
I’m so excited about this! Please do more of this kind of tutorials. Maybe a tutorial on modeling a more detailed castle tower (the round one). Merry Christmas guys
is this rendered in 2.55 yafaray? (plz make a 2.55 yafaray tut
)
Great tutorial Jonathan, just got done with it.
Thanks
Thanks for posting this. But yeah, it will be awesome if you did a texturing vid. Thanks once again.
luuuuv it!
wish there were more archi modeling and texturing and environment tuts!
a great thanks!
and happy holidays!
Great tutorial. I liked how it was more for a next generation game engine. That is what our company is working on right now. A First Person Shooter/ RPG. Thatnks for the tutorial.
yesss, texturing too!!!!!! por favor
Nice one, and yeah we would like to see the texturing
You are making it with to much loops. It will be much more work while unwarping and texturing, and there is very much work just in modeling. There is one smal trick that makes it much much easier to model architecture. Every plane that you want to cut in loops separatly you have to chose and to press ‘y’. It seperates this plane from the verticles in that object and after ctrl+r you have much less loop cuts.
I think that everyone that is modeling architecture shoud use that trick – it’s a improtant thing.
but, a nice tut.
Excellent tutorial. I know the objective is the modeling but I really like the rendering at the start of the post. What were the lights and world settings?
Thank you very much.
Great tutorial, just what i needed to stop me just watching all these videos and actually get modeling. I would love to see follow up as well.
Maybe an interior version too.
This would probably take me about three hours to do. You just hit it in under an hour!
I absolutely love this site and the great people behind the tutorials. I don’t have much time for Blender at the moment, but every time I come back here there’s always another tutorial, or more, which makes me get the thirst again.
You guys are a credit to the Blender community, and the 3D community as a whole.
Rock on! =P
a very interesting tutorial.
Excellent!
my building:http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HCTYhipBGjY/TjLMGpl2_dI/AAAAAAAAADg/5u-ycjzMBpo/s1600/bulding.png
you say a lot of words i dont understand aka big words lol
I am interested in generating XYZ coordinates from aerial stereo photos, and then exporting them to my cad program. I have been working with other modeling programs, but still do not having the success I need. I have exported point clouds.txt and do have a good conversion program to convert to DXF coordinates.
Can this program generate XYZ coords for exporting?
Any help will be appreciated.
Thanks
Pete
Here is some other images of the building that might help in modeling it.
http://www.mediafire.com/i/?ta4bxuoibnyke2c
http://www.mediafire.com/i/?ojgdqqqj7kjwq8a
http://www.mediafire.com/i/?uy8g3kb6826qfsg
http://www.mediafire.com/i/?cxutkgdd2k2twl4
http://www.mediafire.com/i/?48z66hzfhbzg5ee
Using these images in conjunction with insight3d might give a basic line drawing to create various profiles.
http://insight3d.sourceforge.net/
Shawn, are you in the St Charles area?
-Jonathan
No. I used the advertisement in the photo to find it’s location on google. Then used the street view for the google map to pull up different angles.
(2:16) How did you load your reference in? (When switching from perspective view, you already had picture loaded in.) thanx
Just drag and drop image from a folder into Blender 3d view. You have to be in one of the default Orthographic views (Front, Right, Top, etc.) in order for drag and drop to work. It will load it into all the default ortho views.
I did stumble across a way to get that middle window ledge aligned. Under “Transform”, I changed the x entry under “Median” to 0.000. It aligned it right up.
How did you get those numbers to appear along the edges?
They look like measurements. No?
Thank you for this and all the great tutorials.
Dawg
From Edit mode, press “N” to bring up the properties panel. In there, look for “Mesh Display” and check the “Edge Length” box. It should be about the 9th check box in that section.
Does anyone know if this kind of building has a door knob or a door pull? From the pictures I’ve looked at, it appears to be a knob, but, the images are unclear and a bit dark around the door. Most places I’ve been to use a door pull.
http://www.intropc.com/tools/image-resize.aspx?image=9561_9344.gif|width=490
Okay, I have always enjoyed JW’s tutorials but…I gotta say, everyone says I talk fast! Holy Wow! They should watch your tut’s!!!! lol
Always a lot of material covered in a relatively short amount of time.
JW, you really should consider running for about ten miles before doing the tutorials or at least don’t drink caffeine for at least 10 hours prior to making them.
hehe
Just joking…a little bit.
Anyway, thanks for the tut! I’ll have to watch it a few times to get everything though.
Hah yeah I do tend to speed at times! I think it comes from my couple years of competitive debate in high school
-Jonathan
Lol I see
Well, as I said, it really is a great tut and I’ve enjoyed and learned a lot from each of them I’ve watched of yours so keep on keepin’ on.
How do you draw your sketches in Blender. I would really like to know, beacause sketching with a pencil really helps me when planning a modeling.
I am using the Grease Pencil; which you can access most any time by holding down D and drawing with your left mouse button. Or you can hold CTRL + D and draw for straight lines.
-Jonathan
Thanks for your help. I havent found the “Greas Pencil” at all. Have to try that immediately. Blender offers a lot of usefull features, that I have never seen in other applications. Have often been positively surprised since i recently startet to work with Blender. And also the Tutorial Platforms are very well organised. Just Great. Once again thank you…
The grease pencil is located in the tool shelf (T) or the properties (N) panels. Just scroll down through either/both until you find it.
I use it some and there is a tutorial that I found somewhere that really goes into detail about it, but I can’t remember where. I’ll see if I can find it again OR….
Maybe if we talk really sweet to JW and offer him a nice treat, he’ll whip up a quick tutorial (quick being operative with this fast talker. lol) on how to use it effectively.
How did you get that thig up at the begining to choose the windows to extrude them? I can’t do it.
how do you get them measurements and stuff?
In the properties panel under “mesh display” click on the edge lenght
Great informative tute. Ha, sometimes you go quite slow, then at others it’s scary, I have to pause every tenth of a second to catch up!
When you go into blender, you have a panel just to the right of the 3D window. You used it to size the initial cube. I don’t have this window and cannot figure out how to enter dimensions for the building. How do I re-size the cube to a certain dimension? How do I get that window?
Unless I’m misunderstanding your question, the window that you’re looking for is actually the properties panel which you bring up by pushing pressing the “N” key.
To change the dimensions of the cube the way JW did, you need to be sure that you are in Object Mode. Then, look through the properties panel util you find the section labeled “Scaling.”
***It should be the 3rd section from the top. Make sure that you are in Object Mode.***
After you’ve adjusted the scaling to the sizes that you want, press CTRL+A to set those dimensions. To be sure that you’ve applied the dimensions, check the scale settings again and make sure that the X,Y & Z coordinates are all back to 1.
Hope that helps.
when i mirror the center in between the doors keeps over lapping what am i doing wrong
The mirror modifier works by mirroring across the object origin by default. If you position the 3D Cursor at the centerline of the building, select the building and then press CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + C > Origin to 3D Cursor the problem should be fixed.
-Jonathan
Can someone tell me how he got the mesh to be transparent??
When you press z the selected object changes to the wireframe view,
you can also change the views in the 3d-view header (to textured, shaded, wireframe & bounding box).
can somone help me get the refrece thing to work when i drop a pic in nothing happens i, using 2.6 i was doing it prety much just like in Jonathan Williamson modeling the female body video i must me doing something wrong or mised a pice
how did ya select and widen the window with out afecting the other verdeces
At what time in the video?
it was in the begening right after ya addd the vertice and sepretly do the first three i think i got now i did have truble with the mmir modifiyer not working right it cept put ing it way off to the sid or botem but i did get that to work now i am havei ntruble with the two bulding pices stay lind up after i work on the front moving it out like you did i did it to the big part as well but it still mesed up some later on
Ikr… I have the same problem there. I later found out that you press alt and tab and select ‘Faces’. But then when he extruged the mesh as transperant got me…
Sorry to ask but where could i get the image at the start of the tutorial?
I can’t firgure out how to drop a reference image into blender. I have my own image I want to use and I can’t figure out how to upload it so it can be used as a 3D reference model
Hello first of all thanks for your great tutorials but I have a bit of a problem. At 24:50 you start to delete an extra face. I don’t have an extra face but it still looks like that. Here’s a pic of what I’m talking about: http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/4933/problemhsu.jpg
Any idea of how I can fix that? :S I’m sure there’s a simple solution but I barely started learning and I’m a n00b xD
Other than that, I wanted to do the next step you do (without fixing that ‘extra face’) but if I press ctrl+R it does a loop cut over the whole zone instead of just that side you do it in. And besides I don’t know how you ‘snap on’ a vertex to another one.
Greetings
Hi MaR’z, it looks to me like that bottom bit is just an extra edge. You can see that there is only a single face selected. So if you go into Edge Select mode, and then select that extraneous edge and delete it, you should be good to go.
Hello again, I didn’t expect such a fast response!
I deleted that edge but it deleted the whole face from beneath! But I did some extruding from the upper face y managed to put it all normal
Can you tell me how to do that ‘snap on vertex’ thing?
Thanks (sorry if I don’t speak good english, it’s not my native language)
EDIT: I figured out how to the that ‘snap’ thingy, just googled a bit ^^
I’ll continue watching this great tutorial now!
Greetings
Great tutorial however I would cut out the chatter and get to the point. Its annoying
is there an undo anywhere on Blender?
You can undo with CTRL+Z
Jonathan