Making a model of a real building using photographs and then
'projecting' those photographs onto the model can give a startlingly
realistic result but it can also be quite difficult. Therefore it is
important to begin with a very simple shaped building. At the same
time, you want to be able to take photos of the building from all
sides and from a distance, without obstacles such as trees between
the camera and the building. So ideally there should be no other
buildings or obstacles close to the building in question. How can
you get photos of the roof? You may be able to use a satellite image
from Google maps.The 'official' Google way of making a model of a
real building is to take photographs of two sides of the building at
once, with the camera close to a corner of the building. However
such photos won't look very realistic when projected onto the walls
of the building so the method below is based on photographs of
building taken of one wall at a time, with the camera lined up with
the middle of the wall. I chose a building on the VUB campus, about
100m from building C of our school. Do you recognise it?
This building has the advantage of being square when seen from
above, and I was able to take decent photos of three of the four
sides. I could not get a usable photo of the north side however, so
we will have to cheat a bit by reusing one of the other three sides.
I have used Paint Shop Pro to crop (trim) these photos and to make
sure there are no perspective effects (making sure that rectangles
look rectangular).
The south side:
The east side:
The west side:
The last photo looks distorted because the only way
I could photograph the whole wall was to photograph it from an angle
since another building was close by. But at least I have corrected
for this perspective so that the main wall looks rectangular.
The roof:
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