Detailed Description:CPSC 3710 Project
By: Cody McArthur
Detailed Description:For my project I chose to use blender to make a complete external model of my house. The reason I chose blender is because although it looked harder to use than PovRay or Google SketchUp did, I knew that if I could learn it that I would be able to make a better model and it would even probably make the modelling easier. The features I used the most in modelling the building were the extrude tool, grab tool, scale tool, rotate tool, loop cut tool, box cut, box cut remove, and the spin tool. The spin tool was one of my favorites as it allowed me to make things like door knobs and dead bolts and the covers for my electricity meters to look exactly as I wanted them to. Once I had a good grasp on how to use blender I began with the default blender cube and started modelling.
I began by building the roof. This took quite a bit of time to ensure that I got all of the peaks of the roof in the right place and that all of then angles were identical. Once I had the main roof in place I added the second lower hangover that my house has. After doing this I realized I had forgotten to skew my house. Forgetting this early on made it harder to do at this point. I had to create two loop cuts through my house that were side by side and then grab the one side and push it back in the respective axis using the grab tool. I then had to go back and patch the roof in all the areas where the overlap would have been into the other cube. After doing this I moved on to the balconies.
In order to do the balconies I first made two loop cuts to cut out the area where the balconies were going to be. After doing that I extruded up the main corner posts and added the two horizontal railings. That was the easy part. The hard part was making the vertical rods to put in between and to make sure they were properly spaced. This took about 2 hours alone. After doing this I was done the balconies. And I moved on to the side hangovers and columns that are at the entries to the building.
To do this I made 7 loop cuts. I made one where I wanted the peak one at each of the ends and then one on the top and bottom of the peak to make the vertical peak line and repeated the same thought for the bottom two. Once I had three even length lines, one at the peak and one at each end I then used edge select and the fill tool to make the faces and I had my hangover roof. I then added the triangular cover below and the columns and the stairs. These also were made by simply loop cutting and extruding the faces to make the desired shapes. That was the finish of the basic shape of my house. After this I took a few rendered images they are below.
Adding the Details:After I was finished with the base structure of my house it was time to add the details. I began by adding all of the doors and windows to the entire building. This was time consuming as I ran into problems with not having the window panes showing because the solid wall faces were in front of them. This was difficult and took time to fix. After adding the windows and doors to the entire building, I began making the door knobs, dead bolts, electricity meters, and heater vents. A lot of these I modelled in a different blender window and exported as blender objects and then imported them into my house project. For the door knobs, dead bolts, roof heater vents, and electricity meter covers I used the spin tool and mapped out a slice of the object and then spun it 360 degrees to get the round objects I needed. For the other parts of objects I used extrusion, loop cuts, and simple add/remove techniques to get the shapes I wanted. As you can see in this photo all of the detials really brought my house to life.
Next it was time to texture my house. I built a total of 8 textures for my house. I built the stucco and shingle textures by using photo textures off of google (webpages below). The concrete, rubber, metal, glass, and grass I built myself. For the glass I made the material more transparent and a little reflective to mimic the look of glass. For the metal I made the material reflective and grey. For the concrete I made a grey material and then added a noise texture to it which was color a lighter grey to give the divots that concrete has. For the rubber I made a black material and changed the hardness to 15. The rubber was only used on the electric casings for the electricity meter. The grass was definately the hardest to make. I watched a couple of YouTube tutorials, and then decided to try some things for myself. I began by adding a particle system to a plane and making it a hair system. I then gave it more strands and added children. I also changed the normals to .015 and the random to .01 so that it wouldn`t look like it was poking straight up. I then added a material to the plane and colored it green. I went into the strand menu and changed the root width and tip width so that it faded out. I then added the texture and changed the mapping coordinates so that it was strand instead of generated and changed the projection to cube instead of flat. This gave me a nice realistic looking grass texture to add to the scene. I also made a sky background which was done with a sky picture off of google. Below are some pictures of the final product.
The first is my mimic scene and the other three are different angles, lighting and a fun spotlight one.
Stucco - http://www.3dplanview.com/example_texture_images.htm
Shingles - http://richwklein.com/2010/09/08/shingles-and-colors-and-doors-oh-my/
Sky - http://www.photos-public-domain.com/2011/02/19/bright-blue-sky-with-a-few-tiny-white-clouds/