Angled View of Building Windows

I have a street view photo, looking down the street, where the view of the buildings is at an angle. I created a cube at the same angle as the building. I want to use material/texture to place the photo of the building on the face of the cube.

The problem is if I do that, when you look straight at the face of the cube the windows etc are still at an angle like in the photo. I would like them to appear essentially like you are looking at the windows straight on when looking at the face of the cube straight on.

I sort of came with a method where I subdivide the face, then smart UV Project, and line up the vertexes at an angle to fit the grid of the windows.

This sort of works, but it’s not very good. There must be a correct way of doing this.

Thanks for any help.

the standard method would be to straighten your texture using an external program. another way to try would be to set up your scene with your object aligned with the image in the viewport, then load the image as a texture channel with map input set to ‘view’, then bake the texture to a UV channel. I am not sure what free programs are out there that can straighten a texture, but i suspect there are one or two out there. GIMP might be able to do it.
(edit) if it’s not a huge image, you can crop out the bit that you need straightened and post it and i’ll straighten it for you using texturemaker.

There is BLAM for that. Addon which allows to calculate camera position from the image perspective lines. When object then is aligned using camera view to the image texture gets correctly projected. Or so…
Anyways - check it here

Thanks for your help. Also, thank you for the offer of straigtening the image for me, but the image itself isn’t that important, I’m just trying to learn correct technique. I don’t completely understand the Bake process, but it seems that this wouldn’t necessarily change the perspective of the photo. Also, I believe BLAM will also place the photo on the face as it sees it.

What I’m trying to do is trick the image into looking like it’s straight on when it actually is an angled view photo.

GIMP seems to work pretty well. Here are the before and after photos.



I think this is as good as I’m going to get, unless someone else has other ideas.

Thanks again.

Also, I believe BLAM will also place the photo on the face as it sees it.
It’s rather how camera did see the building during the photo was taken.
When that’s done you can move your virtual camera in 3d world and take photo from the front. While there really wont be details which can not be seen on original photo, proportions of the rest will be spot on.

Thanks for the help. I tried BLAM and it does work really well for aligning the cube to the photo.

It seems like I’m doing something else wrong. I always get a warped picture like this when I do “U” then “project from view”:


I don’t have this problem if I change the perspective inside GIMP (my previous post).

You need to subdivide cube more. That will give more support points for the image.

So here are 2 methods. The first is subdividing the face then “U” and “Project From View”.


The second is using GIMP to find the appropriate coordinates, then the ImageMagick command:

convert town.jpg -matte -virtual-pixel transparent -distort Perspective ‘126,10 126,54 125,280 126,273 196,277 194,273 194,53 194,54’ bldg1.png

and then croping with GIMP and then blender “U” and “unwrap”(I think)


They both look okay, but I think the ImageMagick one is a little better.

Thanks for all your help.