Dear Blender Users, I wonder if you could offer me some insight and help to point me in the right direction please. First of all, I have to point out that I have zero experience with 3D software - a total newbie. I am a Delphi programmer however, so I’m not totally computer illiterate - I do have some computer acumen. What I’d like to do is create a 3D-rendered simulation of the market square of the city of Bruges, Belgium… right down to each building (an ambitious project, I know). Since I’m not really experienced at all in 3D computer-aided design softwares or techniques. Could it be a simple as taking photos of each individual building in the square (from different angles), and importing these somehow into Blender to render a 3D object of the building?
Having said that, it’s not really important that the rendering be exact, so in that way I would actually be quite okay to have a “2.5D” rendering, so to speak. It doesn’t need to be perfect from all angles - I just want the user/viewer to be able to “walk through” my city square at street level and see the facades of the buildings all around him. What they look like from the rear or inside, I don’t care! Since there is literally zero space between individual buildings in the real-life square in Bruges, I really don’t care about rendering the proper “depth” of them… I just care about the front “facade” of the building that is visible when the viewer is placed in the middle of the square and “walking” through it.
The other little twist to this, is that I’d like to “re-arrange” some of these individual buildings in the square. For instance, I’d like to take a few buildings from the central square of Brussels or Ghent and fit those in too. You could think of it as basically building a “composite” square of buildings from different Belgian cities. Hence the desire/need to render each building individually.
well, you could simply place a photograph of the facade onto a plane and arrange each of the planes where you want them on the market square but it would look very flat as you walked through. it would look better if you were to model the fronts of the buildings even i little. like inset windows and model steps and things that protude from the front of the building. this only need to be simple modelling, but it would give a sense of realism.
Assuming he’s talking about Grote Markt, the buildings are very ornate. Sketchup is better suited to simple buildings.
Grote Markt at Google Maps…
It can be done in Blender, but it won’t be easy for someone without experience. The good news is that a lot of the details can just be Copy/Pasted once you’ve created the original.
Thanks guys, I’ve been doing some googling around and I came across stuff regarding Sketchup (thanks Remade, for the suggestion). From there I happened upon this site:
About 1/2 way down that page is an article called “Announcing the Google Model Your Town Competition winner”. Here it shows a 3D rendering of the town of Barranco, Peru by a fellow named Jorge De Albertis Bettocchi… with links to his blog. As soon as I saw this, I thought “This is EXACTLY what I’m looking for!!!” and got all excited thinking I’d found the solution. I did some more research about Sketchup and then because rather confused about some things:
how did Mr. Bettochi actually render all these buildings? Did he walk around the town and take a million photos of each and every one… or are all these buildings already within Google Earth, and he just scooped them from there? (I have never used Google Earth and really know nothing about it… could all my desired Belgian buildings be residing, already-made, in Google Earth??).
Is Sketchup currently a free program? It seems to cost about $600. And many of the links and videos I attempted to access were not available or dead links. Is the software still active?
About 1/5th of the way down that same site I mention above, is an article called “Use your own photos in Building Maker”. Upon reading about this “Building maker” plugin, this really seemed to confirm that Sketchup should do the job for me regarding applying flat phots to facades of buildings - rather easily. Only to find out that this plugin seems to be discontinued
So although it seemed that Sketchup might be the way to go, I’m now pretty confused about it. I don’t even know if there’s a SketchUp forum where I could ask my question.
To Steve S - yes indeed, it’s the Grote Markt in Bruges that I wish to model… the buildings are certainly very ornate. But a lot of the buildings that the chap from Barranco, Peru rendered were fairly ornate as well - and his modelling turned out spectacular… with the same kind of “fly-through” viewpoint that I wish to have. Watching his video really made me think that SketchUp could be the answer…
Can Blender do all these things that SketchUp can, and as easily (seeminngly) ?
No, although there are other programs that do this sort of thing.
I’d like to take a few buildings from the central square of Brussels or Ghent and fit those in too. You could think of it as basically building a “composite” square of buildings from different Belgian cities
This is somewhat less incompatible with your goal of easily turning photos into a 2.5d environment. This would make it considerably harder.
But, with the right photos, the right stitching and de-distorting, and the right mapping, you might be able to approximate each building, then re-arrange them.
I would look at photo-to-3D software first, see what kind of output it gives you, and plan from there.
it wont insert building but it will make models of what is actually there. then you could modify the models in blender. it does have a no profit license. http://ccwu.me/vsfm/ and you do have to instal cmvs/pmvs your self. meshlab is also used, but it seems the easiest way to get what you want. use visualsfm and meshlab to make the models, import and arange them in blender, theen render a video or put it in a game engine.
Kemmler, you wrote “No, although there are other programs that do this sort of thing.”. May I ask please the names of some these softwares?
Remade, thanks for the links to SketchUp forum and download.
rdo3, thanks for those suggested softwares. Good to have an alternative should I hit a wall with SketchUp. Problem though is I don’t really have multiple photos of my individual buildings from different angles… (only what I might find on the net, and they’d be quite dissimilar in terms of color, light, size, pixel size, etc.
I think the stumbling block here as many have mentioned is that you have so little experience. using the ‘cheats’ to make a walkabout without modeling everything really requires a good knowledge o what exactly you are skipping to make the effect convincing. But you should try it out for sure.
May I suggest you try to do one or two buildings first and see how you get along and then add buildings in one at a time? it doesn’t seem reasonable to try to do it by mapping out the whole square at once and then raising all the buildings at once, and then texturing them all at once. this might be how a team of professionals would do it, but for you I think expanding out is the better workflow.
Hello I am a an ex Delphi coder myself, I still love Delphi. Second best IDE I have used.
First of all its not that hard to learn 3d graphics , its just time consuming because there so much depth into it. As a coder you know what I am talking about.
Your first choice would be to leverage google maps/ google earth, maybe that city is already modeled ? If not yes you can use either blender or sketchup. Sketchup is easier to use as begineer user and blender is easier to use as a more experience user. But even in blender is not hard to do , you just populate a plane with boxes represnting your buildings and then uv unwrap them to attach the texture photo on them and then you have a very simple render of a city.
The nice thing about blender is that it comes with its own Blender game engine making it very easy to take your 3d scene and make it interactive.
Being a coder you could also create your own blender addon to automate the process, there are already city generator you can use as template. A fellow py coder also once made an addon that use open street format to generate cities that is something it will be useful for you too.
The buildings in that video are very basic; they’re not much more than reshaped cubes. The details are mainly done with textures. If that’s all you want then Sketchup should be enough for you. But if you want to model all that detail, Blender would be the better choice.
Thanks for the reply SteveS. Well, I don’t really need to capture all the intricate detail of those old Bruges buildings… just a reasonable facsimile. For a complete newbie like me, it’s appearing that SketchUp might be a better option to get my feet wet. Perhaps after a while when I become more proficient at 3D modelling and I want to make my model even more realistic, I can then try my hand at Blender.
Hey, nice share there. So many talented people out there doing cool stuff - so much to learn
Also, Andrew Price did a tutorial that might be useful as well.
