Room Interior Tutorial

[GabbyAbby]

Hello,

I am new to Carrara. I would like to create an interior of a room. Nothing too fancy. Just two walls, floor, window cutout. Does anyone know of a good tutorial for this using Carrara? Also, is there a way to create an object to specific dimensions. I can't find any type of dialog box to set the size of the walls in inches. Thanks

[LoneGunman]

Hello there

I'm not aware of any interior tutorials for Carrara, if you are familiar with booleans, it should be farely easy to make what you are looking for from few primitives

[Pete Exxtreme]

In the motion Tab, you have a size line where you can enter the dimension of the object you're working with. Otherwise, for an interior building, the questions of lighting etc are not specific to Carrara. So mostly any tutorial on another software should provide some guidelines and best practices...

[markbremmer]

For true precision in Carrara, I usually use a drawing program like Adobe Illustrator to make outlines that I can then import into the Spline modeler to create 'main' or reference objects.

Also, if you create a reference object in either the Vertex or Spline modeler, you can then scale it using the dimension area in the Property Tab in the Assembly room and then scale new objects to match.

Just post back with more questions when you have them.

Mark

[Toleytoe]

Mike Moir had a great tut. in Mar./Apr. 2005, 3dXtract Mag. There was a link to download all 3dXtract Mags.... just prior to their closing. don't what it is or if it is still available... I'm sure some others might have more info...
Cheers

[Couerl]

You could also just go to www.purplus.com and get Floorplan 9 for $9.95 and draw a house and export that in about 20-30 minutes or so.

I have FP 10 and for 30 bucks it's a pretty neat little proggy, not perfect by any means and it's pissed me off more than once, but it's fast and decent and its easy to draw a house, insert roofs and windows and doors and export as dxf. Then you just import to carrara, convert to Vertex Models and UV map them. (that part takes patience)
With some cleaning up in the VM, they can make for some fun projects too. I have several of them if anyone wants to try them out, they're simple one's I made in Floorplan and converted to Carrara. They're still "raw" facet models and untouched and probably a little messy to work with at first, but they're nicer than most of the freebies you'll find out there. My sugestion is to convert them all to VM models first and then UV map and replace the crappy textures and preset doors with nice ones of your own and maybe even the windows and stuff too. I'd take out all the bathroom and kitchen stuff and any other ugly geometry and replace it with cleaner items as well, but you don't have to.

Throw in some wall paper, lighting, some of your own furniture and maybe a rug or two and you're off and running. Just click the Carrara icons to save them:
http://3dsplash.com/Houses/Forms/AllItems.aspx

[dbigers]

I would suggest to grab the files that Couerl has graciously posted. From there you can practice lighting and texturing. However, if you only want to create a one room interior with some windows. Start with a cube. (this is a quick and dirty way, not the way I would do it most of the time).

Use dynamic extrusion (Shift-H) on the side face that you want to have a window. Think of the side face as a wall. If you hold the shift key down while extruding you can constrain the newly created geometry to the plane of the original face. Now you have a square within a square. Delete it. Now you have a window into the room. (cube). You can resize and move this window anwhere along that face. This is a really rough and quick way to make a room. But if you are not going to see it from the outside, it doesnt matter. You can also leave those windows in their place and set them as "true" windows, if you need the reflection in them. Otherwise, I delete them. It is not worth the time to wait for "Light through transparency" when doing GI renders for most of the work I do. If it is a real picky customer or I want more realism, I will render with them, or depending on the scene I can render without them, then re-render just those sections.

As for working to scale. Look into the grid options. Its not as easy as a regular CAD package or some other modelers, but you can work to scale in Carrara.

For whole houses or sections of houses it is hard to beat FloorPlan. I have version 9 and use it on a regular basis along with Carrara. I started using it last year.

Some of the objects that come with it are quite good. Some appliances, outlets, lights, etc. Even the ones that arent real good quality are of good use because you can use them as a starting point.

I have a recent kitchen picture posted on Renderosity that is currently a WIP. It was made with FloorPlan and Carrara. Just look for recent Carrara pictures of a kitchen. That will give you an idea of what FloorPlan can do. Other than texturing and lighting it is almost all FloorPlan, other than some minor cleanup of the model after it was imported into Carrara.

Good luck and welcome to Carrara!