Photography

In order for buildings to look realistic, textures will need to be applied. There are several steps to take when photographing buildings for texture mapping use:

• For a block face, keep the same distance from the buildings while walking down the street and photographing buildings
• Take a picture of the building looking straight on, try to stand in the middle of the building
• Take photographs looking down the street in order to get protruding signs and facade differentation

Taking photographs of buildings detailed instructions (PDF).

Photo Preperation

After photographs of buildings have been captured, paste them together in Photoshop in order to have an exact image of the block face. Each building will need to be accomidated for parallax distortion. Erase street lights and parking meters, if necessary. Below is a sample texture map with the sky erased and saved as a png file so that the areas around the building are clear.

Applying Textures in Cosmo

The process of applying textures in each modeling package is different. In Cosmo, you simply click on the directory that houses your textures, select the texture, and drag it into the texture map window. Highligh the face of the box you wish to texture and click on the texture within the map window. The texture will appear on the box face.

Texture Mapping

Understanding how textures work will help you to apply textures to three dimensional objects. Textures are applied to the models and exported with the model to the CAVE and VRML. The following links walk through the texture mapping process: