Early 3D Modeling Work

St. Peter's Basilica, The Vatican City, and others

On this Page:

St. Peter's Basilica

Vatican City and Environs

Making the Vatican Buildings and Texture Maps

Poser, Houdini, and Octane Experiments

Ancient Greece

(Click the images for a lightbox slideshow)

St. Peter's Basilica

I made this model of St. Peter's Basilica by assembling its various parts from models in Google's 3D warehouse (now run by Trimble). I imported the models from Sketchup Pro into Carrara Pro 8.5. I optimized the texture maps by consolidating duplicates to reduce load on the graphics card cache. These are some quick renderings of the base model for the Basilica of St. Peter.

The base model is available for free download under GPL3 license. The following zipfile contains the Carrara model with the consolidated texture files and low-resolution images of the statues to illustrate the model construction. The statues are photographs positioned on the model that are rigged to rotate so they face the camera, with bump maps and alpha layers created from the photo shading to enhance their 3D appearance.

The statue photos are public domain, and available in a high-resolution collection. In the following zipfile, the statue pictures have the same names as the low-res versions in the above download, so the contents of its directory can simply overwrite files of the same name in the above file's textures subdirectory for better quality.

These statue images already have an alpha applied outside to create the statue outlines. Carrara imports each statue image file as a texture map into a custom shader three times. I adjusted the diffusion color by adjusting one texture map with a diffusion gradient, then multiplying the second texture map with the result, to adjust the amount that the color gradient affected the final diffusion color. Then I imported the texture map a third time to add a bump map for each file. In Carrara's Shader Room, the top-level shader for the statues appears as in the first picture below. Each statue also has a "Point At" modifier attached to it in Carrara's Assembly Room, which rotates the pictures to face the camera, as illustrated in the second picture below. I found from a distance, the 3D appearance of the statue was more important, and it was not obvious that the statues were rotating to face the camera in animations. The third picture below is just a quick, 30-second render of the scene, without adjusting the lighting or shaders for the particular view.

The first rendering below shows how the hi-res statues look from the ground--Hollywood quality, it transpired, even though I applied the same shader for the bump texturing to all of them, and some of them did need tweaking from the above distribution, as shown in the second picture below.

To reduce polygon count, the pillar arcades and balustrades are built with replicators. The first of the following pictures shows the four pillars masters that are replicated all the way around the arcade. The second picture shows the replicator settings for one of the main four arcade sections. After making one replicator that fit properly, I made four copies, swapped round the XYZ numbers for the other three, the moved them to the right place in the model. I got kind of tired by this point, so some of the extra pillars I had to add in addition to the replicated ones are not perfectly set on the ground, so if you have a close-up you may need to do a little manual tweaking. The good news is, I upgraded to a 4GHz i7 and GTX1650, so I might be able to get back to fix some issues now I don't have to wait so long for screen redraws. As far as I know, though, what issues there are with the basilica model are relatively minor.

The third picture shows the vertex model for the balustrade spindles. I modeled the pillars and balustrades by lathing a vertex model from a 2D plane in the the Carrara modeling room. The vertex models made a huge difference to performance. While I learned Hexagon for modeling, I actually really like Carrara's modeling room, and after I got used to it, learning another tool is really a pain, because I keep banging the wrong accelerator keys instinctively.

A number of CGI artists have shared images they made with the model. I'll put you in touch with them if you like them. :

Vatican City and Environs

The base model is part of a larger scene containing Vatican city buildings, walls, and surrounding buildings. Some buildings are textured, some buildings are mass modeled, and some are replicated. I added trees and streetlamps, with dials to control the lamplight color and intensity in different zones of the model, This render took just under 48 hours on a 3.1Ghz i7, due to volumetric lighting, 3D fog scatter, and the size of the model:

Building the Vatican City model took me two months, after a prior two months modeling St. Peter's Basilica. Here is a view of the model environment in Carrara 8.5 Pro, with an Octane real-time render window on the right:

The model's bridge also has photos of its statues rigged to face the camera. The full scene also has mass models of the buildings on the other side of the Ponte Sant'Angelo, initially created by extrusion from satellite photographs. Showing the full scene with all buildings is too big a load on my humble graphics card, so most the following pictures have the visibility of various parts turned off. The first one is of Pigna courtyard. I cheat, and move the status on the roof for the best ground views.

Making the Vatican Buildings and Texture Maps

To make the buildings, I exported a 3D model from Google Earth Pro, which is free, and can be installed from here. Google Earth Pro has 'layers' which include 3D data of the buildings with texture maps, which may be exported in GIS format. Additional layers of satellite land and ocean data may be imported as described here. The first picture below shows the default view as displayed in the Web version of Google Earth. The other picture shows the 3D layer with 'photorealistic' texture maps of the buildings only.

Then I converted Google Earth Pro's 3D data into .OBJ format and imported into a modeling program. Any 3D modeling program is suitable for import, given that it understands the 3D format conversion program you use. There are a number of ways to do it, and none of them are easy.

The full model, including textures and rigging, shipped in 3DS format. If you are interested in using it, please let me know on FaceBook or LinkedIn (links at end of page), and I will check if a license can be made for you, and how much it would be, but I would have to get it from Google, so it could be quite difficult.

Poser, Houdini, and Octane Experiments

The left render is of the Daz3D Victoria 4 figure with HDR skin maps and hair grown in Poser 11, with an ear ring I modeled myself, imported into Carrara for rendering. Despite improvements to Poser, I still prefer the Carrara renderer. It only took a week to make the model and render Vicky, not including the extensive learning curve on Poser. The right render is of the spaceship in the Andromeda TV series, drawn in the Houdini 18.5 modeling environment with Octane. I really liked Houdini's methodological concepts, but I kept running into a lot of bugs, so I dropped it.

The Andromeda model, in Collada interchange format, is available for free download and without license at the following link:

Ancient Greece

I had also started on a large model of ancient Athens, replacing the pillars with replicators as per the Vatican City model, above. But I dropped the project when someone wanted me to work on the Vatican City and the surrounding buildings instead. They had to tell me, hahaha, not to waste my time on modeling the deer running through the Vatican City grounds, because they were in a rush. Anyway, the first picture in this Athens set is of the roads around Athens as they were two thousand years ago, made by combining layers of satellite pictures in Google Earth. I was using the ground contours from the Satellite data to build the model upon.

The following picture is of the Minoan palace of Knossos on Crete. Again, I put far too much effort into making the interior perfect. I would have had to visit Crete to finish it, and for various reasons I ended up going to Rhodes, Patmos, and Ephesus instead. So I still have the model for it. It is 98MB in a single zipped Carrara file containing all assets, but the figure and oxcart are commercial, so I can't share it. If you're interested in this model please let me know and we can work something out.

The first image below is from the Knossos scene as far as I got. The right pictures were my attempt to make something more romantic. Most of their components are commercial too, so I can't easily share them either. But the trireme and temples, I did do some work on them that is totally invisible in the view I finally chose, which really did teach me quite a bit about how easy it is to waste time in 3D modeling!