I often work on large context facades in order to make renderings for projects in historic districts which need to pass review. I would like to know what types of details are worth playing with texture mapping for, and which are better to model. I know there’s no one way to do anything in Rhino, but I’m tend to base my approaches on keeping file sizes down, and making future changes/updates easier. Specifically, the hope is to avoid 1000s of objects or solids with 100s of faces for a large swath of facade. Sharing any resources or examples you’ve found helpful would be lovely.
Two general examples:
How do you go about showing coursework disruptions? I run into this a lot at openings, lintels and headers especially. Linework or surface divisions are an option, but when using a texture for the rest of the facade this looks out of place. I’ve used edited maps for specific portions of a surface, or split a face and adjusted the UVs, both work but don’t feel particularly intuitive and I’m curious how others handle this.
Is there a better way to approach out-of-plane brickwork like this? From what I can think of the best way is to make panel module blocks made up of brick blocks which inherit their materials from parent for easy use and using some clever mapping to avoid too much texture repetition.
Some more detailed examples of how I approached similar issues recently below:
This facade has each face made of one plane with a multitude of polysurfaces (could/should be made into blocks). This works well because the bumps are extrusions which run uninterrupted vertically resulting in less than 500 total in a model with little other detail.
A similar process of modeling individual pieces was done for these soldier row headers with recessed bricks. I modeled the brick block as extruded squares, with each long face given a different portion of the brick texture so they could be rotated around for some variety. These were then rotated and scaled to create blocks of ABA and BAB groupings so I could get some textural variety and then grouped as objects with as many of these groupings as needed to span the various openings.
This worked but results in more than 500 blocks for just these small areas, and was tedious to layout and update. Most frustratingly the geometry results in a ton extra lines, meaning that for composite renderings I had to switch the active worksession model out from our vray base to this building in order to change the object display modes only for these so they would read correctly.
We maybe could have gotten away with using a texture where every other brick is darker and appears recessed from a distance. But often there’s times when these details are important, where a recess is multiple inches or there’s texture across the entire facade - not just limited areas. Modeling each brick is doable but feels silly.
Apologies for the long post, but I’ve done some scouring and haven’t had much luck finding discussions of how people typically work on large facade projects like these so I’d love to hear thoughts on the topic.
Thanks!