Reference Photo Tutorial for Purdue Virtual Campus
©Jack Moreland

1. In this tutorial we will outline several guidelines for taking exterior reference photos of a building to be used later for creating a 3d. In this case, we’re using Hicks Undergraduate Library. Our goal is to get decent images for every side of the building.

2. First things first, you’ll need a camera, and you’ll need to know what building you want to take images of. For best results, take your photos in diffuse lighting (an overcast day for example). This prevents unwanted shadows from showing up and helps keep the coloring of objects from being affected by the yellow from sunlight. Unfortunately, it was sunny out today, so these images aren’t ideal.

3. For each building, we’ll be needing 3 types of images: reference, orthogonal, and detail shots.

4. Reference images are usually taken from an angle and let us see the edges of a building as well as all the features of a given side. It’s important to fit the whole side of a building in a reference image, even if this means you’re taking the image from an angle.

5. Orthogonal images are often difficult to take because of other objects that might get in our way.

6. In these cases, we’ll need to take a reference image, and then a number of close-up shots. We’ll use the reference image to show us how to stitch together the close-up shots.

7. In Photoshop, copy the close-up shot, and paste it in the far-away orthogonal shot. You will need to resize the pasted image so it will fit the far-away image.

8. Once you resize and place your close-up images, you should have an image that is almost orthogonal (close enough for our purposes). Although the resulting image might not look pretty (obvious seams, color inconsistencies, etc.), it’s good enough for what we need.

9. In some cases, you may not be able to get a far-away orthogonal image, so you’ll need to improvise a bit. The concept is still the same though, stitching photos together to get a an almost orthogonal image of the entire side of the building.

10. Here is where the detail shots can come in handy. Notice all the trees that are blocking our view of the building. We can take our unobstructed detail shots and paste them on top of the trees, resulting in a clearer image of our building. We still see lots of seams and imperfections, but this is okay for what we need.

11. The key thing that we want is to see the edges of the image. This is important later on in the process when we slice up our model in 3dsMax. As a rule of thumb, anywhere a texture changes, we want to see that edge. For example, in this image we have outer edges of the building, brick meeting cement, brick meeting door, brick meeting window, door meeting window, door meeting cement, window meeting cement, and horizontal brick meeting vertical brick.

12. Repeat this process for each side of the building.

13. Once done, we should be able to quickly go into 3dsMax and apply these images to a simple building model to create a low resolution 3d Building. However, since we paid attention to making all the edges visible, we will be able to create a high resolution 3d building by slicing the model using the edges of our images. This is detailed in a later tutorial.