Time to begin putting things into our scene. We will add a ground plane and a raised sidewalk. That will be the foundation. We will also add a Lightdome and combine it with a directional light for a sunny day effect. With this, the My House Project will be ready to start building.
The starting file we’ll use is this one.
When we open the file we should get something like this.
Our project file with units in feet.
Let us create a huge rectangle for the ground plane. 200x200ft.
Draw the rectangle.
Set the dimensions in the Object Properties panel
We have a ground plane
Why didn’t we use the Ground plane Strata Design 3D offers us? Because we are going to move this plane downwards to leave it at -0,3 ft. in the y-axis. In this way, we will leave the raised plane of the sidewalk and the house at the precise level of the grid, making things much easier for modeling.
Indeed, the next step is drawing a cube. Let’s draw the cube with the three click method: One click in one of the corners of the base, another click in the opposite corner of the base and the third click on the perpendicular to define the height. In this case the height will be negative to leave the topmost face of the cube in the horizontal grid.
Drawing a cube with the “height” going downwards.
Resize the cube. 100x100ft. will be an ample base to build. The height does not matter, because it is obscured by the ground plane.
Group the “sidewalk” and the ground. Now it’s time to texture.
We need cement to texture what we have. Strata Design 3D comes with a very good concrete texture that we’ll modify to create cement.
The modified Concrete texture is now a cement texture.
The lightening of the Diffuse Color map was achieved using the Adjust… dialog.
Lightening the Diffuse Color map
We now apply the texture to the group with cubic mapping and a size of 2 ft. per side.
Ground object concrete texture mapping.
That’s our ground. It is pretty large and it can be bothersome when modeling, so we will convert it into a Shy Object (Selection>Make Shy). Shy objects do not appear in the modeling windows or cameras but will render.
Environment and lighting
We will create a simple Horizon environment to use as Light Dome, Reflected and Visible environment.
Our Horizon environment
Our lights. We will fine-tune them later on.
If we do a Raydiosity render we should get something like this.
Ready to start building the house
There we are, ready to start building the house.
The finished file is this one, in case you want to compare.
