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Monday, August 13, 2018

Modeling a Historic Stone Building

Modeling existing buildings can be tricky. I have a couple of techniques to share about modeling this existing public park building. As you will see, this is a work in progress.


To represent the stone walls, there are two basic options. Make a repeatable texture from a photo of the wall, or just use a photo of the wall. Check it out...

Here is a repeatable texture created from a photo of the wall - rendered in Enscape. Not too bad, and the coloring is consistent. This is what I see most people do. It works, and it makes sense.


Here is the texture in Revit. I will do a post in the future about a cool Photoshop workflow to develop repeatable, or tiling, textures. Notice, the scale of the texture is important.


One more angle using the custom repeating texture.


Now, another option is to just use a photo for the texture. This captures the exact condition of the wall (lintels, imperfections, ascents, etc.). Of course, this means you need a picture of each face of the building.


You can use an entire photo as the texture in Revit, no cropping required. The trick is to set the scale correctly. Any part of the image that falls off a surface does not show up! Even at door and window openings. TIP: Use a surface model pattern to re-position the image on the surface.


In come cases, there will be things next to the building like a shrub or a gas line (see image below). You could clean this up in Photoshop, or just leave it... it does not look too bad to me. The stone above the window looks great.


We get all the details in the photo, like this carved stone inlay!



Fun stuff.

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