Modeling Tutorial Using Inkscape And Blender

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building.jpgIn a professional production environment, a large number of tools can be used in projects. Source material can come from many different programs and in a variety of formats or it might be easier to create content in one program over another. For this reason it is important to understand how Blender can be used in concert with other programs, closed or open source.

Ari Häyrinen pointed us to a tutorial which uses Inkscape to construct a floor plan from a hand drawing and then model the building based on the floor plan in Blender. You should check out Ari’s two virtual reconstructions found here. And even though they weren’t modeled in Blender, it demonstrates the use of 3D for the purpose of architectural history.

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    • naught101

      that’s pretty cool. there are a few calls one the inkscape feature request page on source forge to make path the operations more engineering orientated (so you can enter the angle and distance to the next node for instance)

    • postlogic

      Ah, that is a nice tutorial.

      I really enjoy seeing more and more tutorials showing how to pull all the nice, open sourced software together.

    • mrc

      Since blender can import eps, it wouldn’t be more precise (answering to naught101) to draw the plant with a 2d cad such as qcad, then export to ps (in linux and mac os you can print to a file), convert it and open in blender?

      bye,
      Marco

    • edna

      As a structural engineer and Blender devotee, I do this sort of stuff on an almost daily basis. Nice to see a bit of a tutorial on it though. I keep meaning to sort out a video tute of how I do it.

      @naught101: There isn’t that much point being more accurate when working off a sketch like this, although the features you mention would be welcome I’m sure. I tend to pull sketches directly into Blender as UV-mapped textures and trace them with curves. Seeing as Blender allows for keyboard input of angles and the like, and using curves allows you to cut holes out of your walls very easily, it is perfect for this sort of sketch work.

      Thanks for the link etr9j, hopefully it will inspire me to sort my tute out.

    • http://www.renderreality.com Joe

      I agree edna, I just went through this tutorial and didn’t see much benefit over just simply tracing the design in blender itself. I do the same thing from time to time. However, I usually load the image in the background rather than UV map it. This import methodology resulted in a number of unneeded edges and faces that I was required to delete.

      However, I do sometimes wish for a nice, accurate entry methodology and might return to this possibility if inkscape does indeed get updated as suggested by naught101.

    • http://www.renderreality.com Joe

      I forgot to mention, I am funding the creation of a script that may interest some of you as well. Have you ever seen 3d renderings from other programs that support measurement visualization as well? Here is an example:

      http://webpages.charter.net/jackson.ronnie/avs/squareprosc.jpg

      I would like to be able to display measurements at render time in blender as well and am funding a script to do just that. I plan to make it freely available after it is complete.

    • mrc

      @Joe:

      Oh, now this would be great!!! Let us know something!! :D

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    • Peter Munro

      @Joe: Sounds great – a bit like Sketchup’s dimensions? Whatever you do, please make sure it also handles metric (millimetres) for those outside the US! :-)

    • will roberts

      The tutorial links for building an architectural model using inkscape are broken and seem to have been for months now… Please let me know if these are ever going to be repaired and if not where might I find similar tutorials.

      Thanks for your help.

      Best regards,

      Will

    • gokudomatic

      404 not found

    • sinozzuke

      404 not found

    • http://davidbolton.info/ David Bolton

      Web archive has a copy of the tutorial:

      web.archive.org/web/20070824053235/http://www.opendimension.org/ida/inkscape.php

    • http://www.blendernation.com Bart

      @David: link updated, thanks!

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