How can I add doors and windows and interior rooms to houses?

cherpenbeck

I bought come architecture items which are just hollow shells with texture als windows and doors. Is there a way to give these houses real doors, windows and interiors?

The interior itself would be easy, I just make a room which fits snugly inside, windows and doors openings on all the right places. But the exterior shell needs to have real doors and windows as well, because I wish to open the door so that people can look and go inside and open the windows and look through the windows.

Richard Haseltine

A way, certainly - you could use a modelling application to make them by cutting holes in the building and using the supplied doors and windows, if they are modelled, or new doors and windows to plug the gaps. You could also just use a transparency map to hide parts of the wall and plug doors and windows from another set into it. However, if the model building is currently just a thin skin you will also have to thicken the edges up so it could rapidly become nearly as complex as making a new building.

cherpenbeck

Well, the building is extremly detailed on the outside, so I daubt I could model such a house myself. With modeling- would hexagon be able to cut said hole in the wall? The model is an obj file.

So far the only thing I have made with hexagon was making a morph by expanding existing nodes. But Hexagon will be useful for making the thickness of the wall.

Edit:

transparency maps- that is something I still don't know anything about (too new to DAZ, still have to learn a lot)

Richard Haseltine

Well, you mght simply be able to select the unneeded surfaces and set their opacity to 0.

Hexagon may work for simply cutting a chunk out to make a space and pasting it back in to a new model but if you try editing the geometry beyond that it will, as I recall, kill the UVs so that the textures will no longer apply.

Splitting the model down can also be done in DS itself using the Geometry Editor tool (or in Poser using the Grouping tool) by selecting an area (with luck just click the + next to one or more surface names in the Tool Settings pane), hiding the unwanted parts and deleting the hidden geometry (all in the right click menu).

StratDragon

cherpenbeck said:

Well, the building is extremly detailed on the outside, so I daubt I could model such a house myself. With modeling- would hexagon be able to cut said hole in the wall? The model is an obj file.

So far the only thing I have made with hexagon was making a morph by expanding existing nodes. But Hexagon will be useful for making the thickness of the wall.

Edit:

transparency maps- that is something I still don't know anything about (too new to DAZ, still have to learn a lot)

 

Opacity maps would probably not be the way you want to go, they're great for clothing: tares and frays, and while they would work you would get better control working with cuts in the model. I can't get hex to work on any computer I own so I can explain in Blender, the concept should be similar:

 

Fig 1:
I have made the four corners of the room from a flat primitive placed within the perimeter of what I estimate the size of my room to be

Fig 2:
with two vertices selected on one square, and two vertices selected on another square directly across I make a face between the two where the wall is going to be.

Fig 3:
I repeat for the other two walls, I want one side to be open for lights and camera.

Fig 4:
I make a loop cut (or just a normal cut) in the back wall where I want my window to go.

Fig 5:
Select all faces

Fig 6:
Extrude along the Z axis until I reach the height of the "bottom of where I want my window to start"

Fig 7:
Deselect only the "window" face

Fig 8:
Extrude along the Z axis again until I reach "the height of where my window would be.

Fig 9:
Extrude along the z axis from the "top of the window"  to "where the ceiling would go."

Fig 10: 
Select the faces above the window and below the ceiling.

Fig 11:
Connect them (I used the bridge function in Blender, but you could simply select the adjoining faces and do it one by one)

Fig 12:
The room has space for a window

from there I would either 
a) turn off smoothing on the surfaces when I import into Studio
or
b) define edges in Blender and export with the edge modifier so I don't need to make those changes in Studio

so my model does not look like it may be melting and the edges appear "hard" as Studio likes to smooth things out.

Oso3D

Consider that texture can make a huge difference in how detailed a house looks. Good texturing can take simple cubes and make them appear made of gnarled wood, or rusted steel plate, or throbbing alien flesh, or...

 

cherpenbeck

@StratDragon: That would be the interior room for the architecture shell, and I think I can do that in Hexagon.

@RichardHaseltine: I will take a look at the model - if I'm lucky the surface of the door is a separate surface and thus can be made invisible. But I fear if the suface of the whole house is one big texture I will run out of luck. In any case, I can either work with a poser file (should be good with DAZ, as DAZ imports poser things) or with an obj.

@timmins.william: the model is definitely more than just a plain house with a very detailed texture.

sriesch

If you can roughly cut a hole in the wall, you might be able to find a product that has a door or a window that you can then place in the opening so that you don't have to model the entire thing yourself.  You will probably have to modify materials (sometimes you can cheat with a bit of cut&paste to match materials), and architectural styles might not match exactly.  

For example, here's a product that has some wall sections with doors: http://www.daz3d.com/dubious-hallway .  I think there are others.  There are a few free door products out there somewhere too I think.

construction kit products are useful in this instance too, as they may offer doors and wall sections that can be arranged rather than a single solid building.

wgdjohn

Note: The link didn't work for me. I just searched for "dubious hallway" through DAZ Store and got it.

The doors, 6 total and different, are 2 sided and removable from the wall.

Only negatives I found were A) door frame is part of the wall B) hinges must be a texture, don't remember them coming along with the door C) it's too bad that there is no wall without a door but after all it is a hallway with doors. But I'm just being *picky* since using Carrara to create a complete windowed door with seperate parts/objects you find on a real life door such as hinges, knobs, knob lock buttons, window, door frame etc. for a client's website who sells/installs doors. Dummy me did not make a *solid* not windowed door but am planning to make a few versions for myself now that I have all the hardware.

John ~Wilson Graphic Design~

cherpenbeck

I'm still fiddling with daz and hexagon- but I wish to thank you all for your answers. I might succeed ...

wgdjohn

cherpenbeck said:

I'm still fiddling with daz and hexagon- but I wish to thank you all for your answers. I might succeed ...

 

Oh never say "might"... say "will succeed". You already have the texture even if you need to drastically modify it. StratDragon's sample looks like the way to go, I really need to take the time to learn Hexagon and Blender. Good luck with your "fiddling".