What's your modelling process for a house?

[mzagorski]

When you guys are modelling a house in 3dsmax (I'm using v9) what's your process? I'm putting together an exterior render... I don't care about modelling any of the interior.. Just the shell of the house.

 

How would you guys create the walls? Create a spline for the entire border of the house, extrude to the window sill height, then to the head height, then to the plate height.. so that you can remove the area's where windows will be placed?

 

Or... is there an alternate / better method?

[JamesTaylor]

personally i model in AutoCAD and then file link in to Max... i don't know if this is an option for you?

[santoshkarandikar]

When you guys are modelling a house in 3dsmax (I'm using v9) what's your process? I'm putting together an exterior render... I don't care about modelling any of the interior.. Just the shell of the house.

 

How would you guys create the walls? Create a spline for the entire border of the house, extrude to the window sill height, then to the head height, then to the plate height.. so that you can remove the area's where windows will be placed?

 

Or... is there an alternate / better method?

Hi Mike,

Currently I use AutoDesk VIZ for modeling & rendering. I model using elevation method instead of plan method unless there are curved/ irregular shapes in the plan. By creating using elevation method I save faces by unchecking the cap end/start. I am comfortable using this modeling method. Give it a shot you might like it too.

Thank you,

Santosh

[voltaire_ira]

I personally like modeling the complete exterior of the house(no interiors) in max.

i just prepare the plans and the orthographic views in cad then import them to max. in max, i make a 3d ortho-box with the cad drawings in their respective ortho views...then with a line, i just trace the building footprint...extrude...convert to poly...then slice away the openings and extrude inwards....snapping is very useful and axis constraints

 

it is more like the elevation method mentioned by Santosh.yup u get to save lots of faces this way.. by using editable poly, you can control the mesh effectively by removing unwanted edges and vertices making the model very light and easy to troubleshoot when changes / revisions are needed.

 

we model many houses in a week, a complete house can be done this way very fast, a model can be completed in less than 4 - 5 hours..complete..(depending of the size and complexity of course)