| Project Fundamentals: Taking
Photographs |
Photography |
In order
for your buildings to look realistic, you will
apply images to them. There are several steps
to take when photographing buildings for texture
mapping use:
- If you are creating a block face, keep the
same distance from the buildings as you work
your way down the street
- 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 (PDF).
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Photo
Preperation |
| After
you take the photographs, paste them together
in Photoshop so that you have an exact image of
the block face. You will have to accomidate for
parallax and 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. |
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| Piece the block face
together. You will notice that some of the buildings
are not straight. You will have to skew them into
place. |
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| Layering the images enables you to erase over
multiple views to match the perspectives and get
rid of cars. |
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| Here, I am skewing the building top into place
and lining up multiple images of the building to
complete the building . |
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| I have lined up the photographs and will complete
the street lights and sky to complete this block
face. This method accomplishes 2 things: gives me
an idea of where street lamps go and other 3 dimensional
objects, and ensures me I have the buildings straight. |
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| I have painted the sky and completed the street
lights. Save this file as a PSD, do not flatten
the layers. Turn off the sky and street lights,
and flatten the image. Select one building at a
time, copy and paste it into a new file, delete
anything not related to the facade and save the
copied facade as a .png. You can then apply this
texture to your model in a process called texture
mapping. Open
this VRML file to see the building on the left applied
as a texture. |
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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. The following links will take you through
the texture mapping process:
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