House creation: The basic building blocks

In the first of this three part series, we will create the interior and exterior of a housing project, along with a landscaped garden and you will learn some important tricks with lighting and rendering.

Normally my clients send me AutoCAD files of their housing projects. As this is a beginner’s tutorial though, I’m going to use a simple blueprint image I got from Google. Don’t forget though, that if you use your creations for commercial purposes, you may be violating the image’s copyright. Save the image (make sure it is high resolution by the way) and open up Max. Right-click the top viewport to activate it and create a plan object (Create>Standard primitives>Plane). Don’t worry about the size as we will be changing that in a minute. Hit ‘G’ on the keyboard to hide the grid, then right-click the word ‘TOP’ and select ‘Smooth & Highlights’ and ‘Edged Faces’. You might also want to lower the number of segments in the plane to keep your workspace clean. With the plane still selected, you will have its options on the right hand side. Lower the number of length and height segments to 1.

Right, now to bring our house plan image into max. Hit ‘M’ on the keyboard to bring up the material editor. To get the image onto our plane object, we need to do a couple of things here. First, click the little grey square to the right of the Diffuse rectangle (1: circled red) then another screen should pop up. Select ‘Bitmap’ (2: circled red) and yet another screen pops up which we use to browse to where you saved your house blue print.

Once you have located the image file and clicked ok, you still need to do two more things in order to see it in the plane object in the viewport. First, click on the ‘assign material to selection’ button (1: circled red) then click the ‘Show map in viewport’ button (2: circled red). It is also a good idea to change the width and height of the plane object to correspond with the image file. In this case it is 1536x1536 pixels.