Architecture / Greek neo-traditional house #1

Hello , it has been a long time since my first post here at elysiun and a lot has happened since then: most important is my use of blender professionally as an architect. After a year I managed to get blender to do what I wanted as an architect so now is the time to post some pictures.

http://img453.imageshack.us/img453/6033/b116og.th.png

http://img397.imageshack.us/img397/2136/aopsh37sl.th.jpg

http://img490.imageshack.us/img490/9721/aopsh22nz.th.jpg

http://img454.imageshack.us/img454/7003/aopsh10sf.th.jpg

http://img375.imageshack.us/img375/6937/b137ad.th.png

http://img358.imageshack.us/img358/2056/b826ga.th.png

http://img354.imageshack.us/img354/7674/cc728ay.th.png

http://img359.imageshack.us/img359/9081/cc29tu.th.png

Any crits are welcome.
PS: this is an actual design of a house, when construction is finished
I hope to uploed some images of the real thing.

I 'll make another post with one more house, also made with blender.

Try to use JPEG image format next time - the imaes will be a lot smaller, and not everybody have fast connections.

The designs are nice.

I’m not convinced that simply using jpeg instead of png will make the files smaller. Frequently a png can have a smaller file size and look better than a jpeg of the same image if the parameters are adjusted properly.

Dropping the color depth from 32 to 24 bits will make a large difference- and there is no getting around the fact that images of these pixel sizes will have large file sizes.

These images are very nicely rendered and I like the house. Your lighting is very good- it brings out different nunances of the design.

I’d like to live there.

Sorry for the large files, I got carried away with my broadband connection.
I agree though that pngs can have a better quality / size ratio than jpg.
Will try with smaller image depth and size next time.!
Thanks for the nice comments.

hi mave, I’m interested on how you use blender for architecture models.

Do you elevate/extrude floor plans or make separate walls?
How do you open windows? With intersections, deleting vertexes and/or faces or preparing them from floor plan elevations?

What I mean is I know the technical way to do all these, but I wonder wich becomes more efficient with use, or maybe there is a technique I am missing. Thanks.

Btw, there is a fantastic/easy way to make ‘walkable’ shaded models in blender wich I am experimenting with right now. It allows to render the model with radiosity shadows and get an windows executable wich you can navigate with a camera with the cursors and the mouse. The best tute is in portuguese, but if you are interested I can help you with that one:
http://cogitas3d.procedural.com.br/tutos/radiosidade.html

Well actually I Extrude the walls from floor plans , not as separate objects but as a single mesh. then I use the knife/loop tools , in front and side view to cut the outline of windows , doors , or any other openings.then I extrude them to the inside, deleting the inner face. Then I place the actual frame of the opening along with a single plane representing glass.
This method comes straight from autocad modelling, exept there you use
substractions for creating the windows.

There are variations of course , where some walls are single objects and not part of the main mesh. It all depends on what part of the pipeline you are working on , (whether you have plans and elevations/or sections or you design the building/concept in blender ) . I am thinking of producing tutorials on methods for architectural design in blender, not only inside blender , but also for incorporating blender in the production pipeline of an architectural office. (for example how to use blender for the actual architectural design , concept ideas and so on, or how to exchange data with other programs )

I think that this is the most effective way. I have not yet tried the new
boolean functions of 2.40 , but if it is any better than before, I ’ ll try to post soe progress on how to use them effectivelly.

that seems really interesting! I 'll give it a try and get bacjk to you if I have some problems with… portuguese ! I do not speak a single word of protuguese! I’ll try to get along with the pictures!
Thanks.

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fcogitas3d.procedural.com.br%2Ftutos%2Fradiosidade.html&langpair=pt|en&hl=en&safe=off&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools

That really long url is google’s translation into english. It does pretty good, it’s actually readable :o
Hope that helps…

This is getting really off-topic but…

It does.

Png can be smaller than jpg if the image has a lot of flat areas, but in pretty much every case, jpg is smaller. Png is lossless (so it’s always full quality) and jpg lossy (so you get artifacts and it’s what what makes them a lot smaller). The artifacts are unnoticeable with higher quality settings.

For example, I took one of these pictures (the last one) and saved it in gimp.
png: 563kB
jpg, quality 100: 372kB, no visible degradation at all (none that anyone can find without using an image manipulation program)
jpg, quality 90: 134kB, very slight degradation that you don’t find without specifically looking for it

Nice use of Blender, btw. :wink:

I agree that speaking on pure technical terms .jpeg will always be smaller than png. But practically speaking you can get a png in a small size, comparable at least to jpg.

Anyway , the point on my part is taken and I 'll try using smaller files in the future.
thanks everyone.
mave

Mave & nf3

I am also trying to use blender as a main tool for our architectural office and am very much looking forward to see how others go about modeling Architectural designs. Until now I have just been modeling everything as individual objects and would love to see how exactly to cut out windows etc. from one mesh.

I think this method would make file sizes much smaller as well. I currently just finished a presentation for a client of ours and ended up with a 65 mb .blend file. This caused some trouble editing towards the end.

Mave,
When modeling, do you keep everything as one mesh until the end and then seperate to apply different materials? Or is there a way to keep everything as one mesh and apply certain materials to linked verticies?

Nice ArchiVision too, I like the architecture very much. It has a very dynamic feel.

Feel free to see the video presentation I recently did for our client here. it’s about 20mb

http://www.mdiconst.com/CarriageHills.mov

Mike

For cutting windows, I just cut the mesh with the knife tools. Just select the vertices of the mesh you want cutted, press"k" key , and experiment.
or read this part of the documentation on using the knife tools:
http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/PartII/Edge_and_Face_Tools#Knife_Tool.2FCut_Type

when invoking the knife tool you can also press the middle mouse button and have your cutting edge on orthogonal mode, vertical or horizontal. Also the new version of blender 2.40 has a knife mode of multicut , with which you can make some curtain walls or objects like that.

Well, modelling everything as individual objects is a way to go I guess, but it hinders things as you may end up with lots and lots and lots of objects! What I try to do is have different meshes for different “shells” or objects in my design. So this design you see here is actually one mesh, until I start putting materials on it. Then I try to either separate the part of the mesh with a different material (choose it with “b” key in edit mode, then press “p” key , and it will ask you if you want it separated.) But there is also another method of using different materials on different parts of a mesh . go check out this part of the documentation:
http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/PartIII/Multiple_Materials

Anyway , I think that I should try and document some of my methods so everyone can benefit and expand on them. They are not anything special compared to other stuff hapening on elysiun, but for architects it pays to have some presision in your modelling.

I 'll try to check out the animation from home, since i am on a linux box at work and .mov files don’t play really that well on linux. :slight_smile: