Discover how to create 3D perspective views in design programs, offering a more realistic look at your building model. This article explores different methods of creating perspective views, including tips for navigating the section box and using the camera tool for presentation type views.
Key Insights
- The article demonstrates two primary methods for creating a 3D perspective view in design programs: changing the projection mode from orthographic to perspective, and using the camera tool to create a more detailed and controlled view.
- While using the camera tool, it is important to ensure that the entire building is covered by the field of view. Adjustments can later be made with the crop region on the 3D view to include any missed sections of the building.
- Additional tips for enhancing the perspective view include turning on shadows for depth, adjusting the lighting, and using the ambient occlusion feature for more texture. These changes can provide a more realistic and detailed view of the building model.
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We're going to take a look at another 3D view type, and in this case we're going to look at how to create a perspective view. This can be done a couple of different ways. So I can take the view that we have here, and I can change the projection mode from orthographic to perspective, and it'll tweak the view so that we're now looking at it in more of a perspective view.
And this gives you a more realistic look at what the building looks like. And so I can do the same thing with the section box, but one thing that I will caution is that this can get a little out of hand and be hard to navigate with. You can see it's already kind of twisting on me a bit here.
And we can also turn on or off the section box just by unchecking or checking that box again. So that's one way to create a perspective view. This can come in if you need to do a quick view to show somebody the proportions of the building.
It's a very simple way to create that view. If you wanted to create a more presentation type view, what I would recommend doing is going back to level one. And instead of using that default 3D view option from our view tab, what we could do is we can actually pick the dropdown.
So you'll notice that a few tools have this drop arrow on it, and that just means there's more options that we could use to create that view type or even that element type. And in our case, with 3D views, we have default 3D view, which is what we were just looking at. And we also have camera and walkthrough.
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And so we're going to take a look at camera here. When I create a camera, it'll allow me to place the starting point of the camera, which in our case, I'm going to pick kind of in this area here. And I'll just do that by left clicking to start it.
And then I can pick the end point of it. And the key here is to make sure that you cover the entire building with this end point here. If I stop at that point, that's essentially going to clip the view at that location.
So I want to make sure I cover the entire building with it. And you can see here, if I'm not covering it with the field of view, which are those two lines on the outside, that's not a big deal, because I can change that later with the crop region on that 3D view. If I were to say, do something like that, you can see that I've now got a 3D view, but I missed a whole section of my building.
So I can go ahead and I can adjust that crop region to show my view. And now I've got a pretty cool two-point perspective of the building. Some things I can do to make it look better is I could say, turn on the shadows.
And that instantly gave the view a lot more depth. So I'll zoom in on a little bit more so we can see it a little closer. And then I can also do something like go to a shaded view, which is then going to turn on the color and the texture of the materials that we see here.
So you can see the brick patterning there and obviously the color of the brick. Another thing I can do that's going to give me a little bit more texture is I can go in and if I click on the visual style dialog at the top, it says graphic display options. So I can go in here and I could adjust some of these items.
One of the things that I like to do is I'll turn on what's called ambient occlusion. And that just gives you a little bit softer light. It kind of creates gradients on walls where you have shadows.
You can see here this went from like a harder shadow to more of a gradient. I could also go into the lighting section here and I could tweak the sun brightness, the ambient level, and the shadows. If I were to take shadows down to say 15 or so and hit apply, you can see the shadows become a little bit less pronounced.
I could even increase the sun to brighten up the model a bit and I can even adjust the lighting to be from a different angle. And this one seems to be fine here, but just for our demonstration purposes, I can go to lighting where it says in session lighting here. And these are the default options, but if I were to say sunlight from top left, you can see it changes the sun angle or go back to sunlight from top right.
And it changes it back to essentially what we had before. We can also go in here and we can set it to be a still shot, which means I can pick a specific location and a specific time and date of the year here. If I were to say, let's do summer solstice and I'll just leave it at noon in Boston, I'm obviously going to get very different lighting than what we had with just a generic from the top left.
And so if you wanted to go back to just the generic one, you weren't too worried about it, you can definitely go through here. So like I was saying before, with that sun path diagram, we're able to locate our building on earth anywhere and anytime as well to see how the sun's going to react to our different design elements. Another thing we can do, which will help create some depth, is we can use a silhouette, which will give us a wide line around the building.
You can see by doing that, it gave me a bold line. That's definitely a preference thing if it's something you like to add or not. And we can also go in here and kind of mess with adding sketchy lines to it.