When I talk with some professional 3D users, that mainly work in architectural environment, the first question is about a quick (time is money!) and best way to model the doors and the window of a house.
The most of cases I must compare Blender with Rhino and Alias Design Studio. The workflow commonly used with these softwares is
import DXF
in front view, get the profiles of doors and windows
in front view, make a plane (the external face of wall)
in front view, project the doors and the windows on the plane
trim the surface…voila’
In Blender the “project on to” and the “trim” does not exist (I’ve tried the cookie cutter, but without good result (and, mainly, without quickly result).
So, in your opinion, what’s the best way to model these elements?
This question is very importants for all people that wish use Blender to model architecture…
A satasfactory door model can be easily created and recreated using a fairly low poly count by simply modeling the door using the box method, saving it, and then importing the mesh into whatever architectural model you might need to use and positioning it accordingly. If you need me to elaborate on this, let me know. By the way, this should probably be in the “Blender General” forum.
hard work compared to archicad or sketchup. blender does not have an interactive non-destructive boolean function that will cut away the space you need for the door or window!
If you need curved parts, yes, use beziers (or NURBS, but beziers are easier to tweak for precise positioning). Otherwise, just add a nurbs curve (or circle) and click the Poly button in the Editing window (F9). This makes it acts like a bezier curve with vector handles without the handles.
Curves have automatic booleans. Just add a smaller circle in a bigger one to see what I mean.
OK. It 's the best method to quickly have wall. Furthermore, thanks the button ext1, it’s possible have in few clicks the width too. Continuing this thread, the next question can be:
“what’s the best way to get the doors and windows in the correct place?”
For example (2 windows 1X2 m in one wall 10X3 m):
1)I make a square 1X1 units using poly.
2)I duplicate this quare 3 times.
3)using Nkey, I resize one square xsize = 10 and ysize=3
4)using Nkey, I resize the last two squares xs=1 and ysize = 2
5)ok…now I must put the first win using a distance of .5 meters from left
border, and the distance between two window must be 5 meters…what’s the best method?
To put windows into a wall, I create a big cube that I model into a wall. Then with the knife tool I create the hole for the windows. Then I select 4 point forming the “frame” of the windows in the wall and I separate them (P key). This gives me the size for the windows. It is easy to do the windows then…
I’m using Blender for 8 months now, and modeling doors, walls or windows is certainly what is easier to model, and only few features of Blender are needed.
To model walls, I first add a grid plane for the floor, with a subdivided level that create squares equal to the width of the thickness of the basic walls.
In vertical view, I select the vertices belonging to the walls.
This done, I use Extrude dup in the Mesh Tools panel, and extrude vertically (Set Step number before) with an Offset equal to the thickness of the walls too, or less.
The walls are created.
To make holes for windows and doors, just remove vertices on the two sides of the walls, make faces where they are needed and move vertices to ajust the height and width.
For the doors, I only use basic modeling, and very few vertices.
The structure of the door is unsubsurfed, but the woodcarved panels are subsurfed with a level 1. As Blender doesn’t allow unsubsurf and subsurf in the same object, the objects are separated and the structure is made Parent of the woodcarved panels.
You can download a little movie of my current work, using this method.
I have compressed it to allow a file not to heavy, but is takes yet 4MB.
as an architect, this problem ist really important for me using Blender. After some trying, I made out a -IMHO- good way to model window and door openings. Like ROUBAL, I use a grid to model the wall but with this little difference:
In front view (NUM 1 or NUM3), add a grid. Select the x-resolution according the number of Windows x 2 plus 2. The y-resolution should be at least 4 (for balustrade, window opening and lintel)
Select and erase the faces where the windows and doors shall fit in, or separate them with P and move them to another layer, just as you like. Be careful, do that one by one, otherwise you’ll get just one big hole in the middle of the grid.
Now extrude the mesh according to the thickness you want the wall to have.
Voila, there’s one facade with window and door openings for one floor. You may copy or dup it as you neeed, depending on the number of floors your building shall have.
Proceed the same way for every facade of the building.
Finally, in plane view (NUM 7), assemble the exterior walls to build the building.
To build the windows and doors themselves, I also use grids and extrude or bevel the faces I need.
I prefer this method, because I find it’s a really quick way to get the facades done using Blender to visualize architecture.
Well I’m an architectural guy. Well, I don’t know anything about architecture, but I visualize it anyway Here’s the way I create my walls:
As you said, I export the drawing in the cad application as a dxf and import it into blender.
To make a wall, simply select all the points you need for it from the mess of points and lines in the dxf object, SHIFT+D to duplicate them and P to seperate them. Go out of editmode, select the new object containing the points needed for the wall. Select all points and press X to remove “all edges and faces”. This leaves you with the points only. Now you can simple create the faces yourself.
This is by far the fastest way to do this in Blender. The curve thing would be nice but isn’t very usefull, because we haven’t got decent (read fast) snapping. So the only way to snap is to simply use the points in the dxf file and draw with them.
What brings to light a new feature… Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to convert a mesh object to a curve? Even if it would be only the points or also the edges. Ah well, on the other hand, with meshes you have complete control over face creation. Curves are bound to give you messy meshes.
I have a program that makes ttf fonts out of bitmap images that i use for this. I made one alphabet strictly for architectural elements like doors and window frames and such,…so when I go to make a building, or several of them, I just load the font, and type in the various elements. This is particularly helpful if you use the ‘spacing’ option, which allows you to then type in a whole row of evenly spaced windows or whatever, and when you assign the materials, you are assigning for the whole row. Or even several rows of ‘text’ at once.
I’ve used the grid method several times myself, it’s especially easy if you establish a scale – something like 1 Blender Unit = 1 meter. That also makes the Numeric Inputs much more useful.
Here’s the way I create my walls: