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 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.

Tip: If you are not yet familiar with using the Material Editor and texture-mapping modifiers, you might want to go through the Materials And Mapping tutorials.

Warning: The 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 2015 tutorials. See Where to Find Tutorial Files.
On the Quick Access toolbar, click (Project Folder) and set your current project to Autodesk 3ds Max 2015 Tutorials.