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http://users.skynet.be/fb365152/tutorials/urbandes...
1. GENERAL ISSUES
The two projects have very big scales (first one is 29 million m, second one is only 1,2 million m...) so we absolutely
needed to find techniques to avoid modelling as much as we could, and keep very simple objects. In case of project 2,
we also wanted to do some close-ups because we have those special spots (olympic tracks, buildings...), so a couple
of places are more detailed. These images show you more or less what complexity the scenes have:
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As you can see, there are very few objects. In the first case, almost everything was modelled directly in Blender, as I'll
explain below. In the second case, we had a pretty more detailed CAD drawing, so most of the objects were imported
from AutoCAD, and we modelled only the buildings in Blender. In both cases, you always want to try to avoid modelling
and use mapping also as much as you can. In first project, you see that only streets and buildings are modelled. All the
rest is made only with mapping.
An important point is that Blender doesn't like much scenes bigger that 1000 units... so if your projects has a dimension
bigger than 1000 units (meters, kilometers, whatever), it's better to start with scaling down everything by 10 or 100, and
just imagine you're working with units 10 times bigger. In these examples, we worked in meters but in Blender, every
blender unit was 10 meters worth.
2. BACKGROUND
The background used in both cases is a mixture of maps taken from GoogleEarth. Since the program only lets you save
very small images (unless you buy some commercial version), you need to join all the small images you saved into a big
one, what we did with the Gimp. In our endless efforts to work less, we made several images with different resolution,
since you don't need so much detail further away from the project center. Each image is then used as a map on a
different plane, with a little vertical distance between each plane to avoid openGL artifacts.
The important point here is scale well the images from start. GoggleEarth has a measuring tool I found very accurate (I
measured an olympic swimming pool I knew measured 25m, it gave me 25,15m...). Once you have a distance between
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2 points on your image, you can know what are its total dimensions. When you know your image represents an area of
let's say 300m x 400m, you just have to make a 300x400 plane (or 30x40) in Blender, and apply your image as mapping
and you have your world at exact scale to work on. At this stage, it's a good idea to do some test renderings to check if
the resolution is sufficient (we used the maximum resolution GoogleErath can give, which is high enough in most
cases).
3. MODELLING
Here we used 2 different methods. The first one was modelling everything in Blender, and the other one importing
almost everything from AutoCAD (which is what we use at office, but the procedure is almost the same with any CAD
program).
We started from the GoogleEarth map (1), layered on it in the Gimp the dirty hand-drawn sketches (2) we had for a
project (if you don't have any, you can just skip this and go directly to step 4 below, and draw directly on the map), and
we used that as a view background in Blender (3), in a top view. With your plane already scaled, it's easy to fit the
background image in it.
Then you can just draw plane shapes on it, like you would in any CAD program (4). You start with a plane, select an
edge or a single vertex, and CTRL-left-click to extrude your shape on top of your sketch. This goes very fast and
requires very little vertex-by-vertex editing after. We made one shape for roads, one or two for special green areas, and
one for buildings. Then again, you must leave a little space between each shape otherwise Blender gets a bit confused
about which is above which.
The buildings are modelled just the same way: Simple plane shapes that got a little extrusion:
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4. MAPPING
Here is the best part: You take back your GoogleEarth+Sketch image, open it in the Gimp, and add new layers, each
one for a different object you want in Blender (for ex. different vegetation types, trees, pools, lakes, roadsides, sand
zones, etc...). This is most useful when you do everything in Blender, since you dont have any object yet, only the
roads and your background plane.
On each layer, you can paint only with black if you're going to use it as a mask for a texture, which is better for large
areas, or directly with color when you're adding details.
Once all of this is done, its just a matter of saving each layer as a separate image (png format is best since it keeps
alpha values) and apply them as a texture on several copies of your background plane, all separated by a small space.
You can mix several textures in one material if they are all ground materials, or create planes that are a bit higher, for
example for trees, so trees will give a little shadow on the ground:
5. VEGETATION
In big architecture or urban projects, you always find yourself with the problem of vegetation. Above a single building
with a few trees around (which looks quite poor), you always need to find cheap ways to stuff your project with
low-rendering-cost-vegetation...
Here again, we used two different methods, according to the project type and scale.
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Here you begin to see clearly that the trees are actually a
large horizontal plane, situated a bit higher than the
buildings, so it projects shadows on the other objects.
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Again, we used our project from AutoCAD, exported as a jpg image, and used as a viewport background in Blender. On
top of this, you draw horizontal plane meshes putting points where there are trees, more or less alternatively. Once you
have several polygons, one for each tree type, you just parent the tree to the polygon, hit duplivert and you find yourself
with a tree on each vertex of the polygon, all facing the camera:
Once your polygons are mounted, it's very easy to make the small adjustments you'll certainly need (a tree in the middle
of the pathway, etc...). Just edit the mesh, and move the guilty vertex. The bad side of this method (there is always one)
is that the duplicated tree looks at the camera, not every clone. This gave us problems when the camera goes deep into
the forests (look at the animation).
6. LIGHTING
These 2 projects are so big that we didnt bother much with lighting, since result would be very uniform anyway. In the
Almoloya project, there is only a sun raytracing shadows and a hemi. In Mxico, a sun throwing raytraced shadows and
2 spots with very soft buffered shadows to make that fake radiosity on the buildings walls (see here above).
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Mxico
Almoloya
7. THE SAUCE...
The final touch, the cerise sur le gateau, is all the living things you can put in the scene. This is the architect's oldest
trick, but it always works: Put some people in your drawings and people will imagine themselves in it already. So we put
people, parked cars, moving cars, streetlights, all things that you can propagate quickly through your scene to fill it
without the need to model much or copy things one by one.
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People
They are only vertical planes facing the camera (Locked
Track function) with an alpha-image mapped on it. Same
technique as for the trees.
Parked Cars
In Almoloya, they are made the same way as vegetation:
One big plane covering the whole area, on it an alpha
mask I made in the Gimp painting little black rectangles on
a white layer. I then used a very dense Magic texture as
color map, to make color variations between the cars. In
Mexico, they are the usual low-poly car models you find
everywhere on the net.
Streetlights
These are a made of a simple extruded tube, dupliverted
on a plane mesh. It is the same technique as the trees I
described above.
Moving Cars
They are simple boxes following a closed path curve. One
box is parented to the curve, then duplicated, each copy
receiving a different time offset, so they move at same
speed, but are on different positions on the path, giving
that traffic look of several cars moving at same speed.
8. ANIMATION
To animate the camera, we used the most basic technique, the camera follows a closed curve, so the last frame is the
same as the first frame, to allow us to leave the video running endlessly behind us when making the (endless too...)
presentation speech. The camera is parented to an empty, with a look-at constraint, so you get the same behaviour as a
3d Max camera: you get a target, that you can animate too.
That's it, more or less. Thes two projects were made in about two weeks each, one week for 2d project development,
and one week for 3d and rendering (using all computers of the office, each animation rendered in about a weekend). I
apologize if something in all this is unclear, but I guess it's not so important to follow these methods step by step, since
every project asks for specific solutions. I hope I could at least show you how easy it is to use Blender for those big
scale projects.
The big idea is always to find ways to stuff your scene with many objects, or at least give the impression of many
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objects, but keep the rendering time low, since rarely, in the architecture field, your client or even your boss has the
smallest idea of the time needed to mount complex scenes, not to talk about rendering times. This added to the
marvelous habit of changing the project continuously, will make you regreat it if you spend much time modelling.
Cheers
Yorik
yorik.orgfree.com
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