A quick and dirty method for modelling a building in Blender from a photo.
Rendered:
With Material shading:
With Solid shading:
Find a nice building texture. It needs to have no perspective distortion, and be mostly made of fairly simple vertical surfaces. I got mine from textures.com.
Now set it to be your background image. Go into “Front” view and create a plane with the exact same dimensions. This is your back and it’s important none of the rest of the building goes outside the boundaries or the textures won’t be lined up right. Set the back to a transparent texture.
Copy the back and create the walls as the basic building silhouette minus windows. It’s better to err on the side of smallness, or you’ll end up with sky on your walls. Extrude the plane backwards to make a solid shape.
Set the walls to a new building texture which uses your chosen building image, vector set to UV.
Create the window frames. Move a little behind the walls. Make a flat plane with a glass texture and move it a little behind the window frames.
Make one or more decoration layers for sticking out bits like window sills etc, and move in front of the walls. As you can see my shapes are pretty half assed with a lot of extruded rectangles and a few circles.
The original version was a lot flatter at this point in construction then got edited once I could see what I was doing.
Combine all your objects into one. Here I’ve used different colours for clarity: back in brown, glass in blue, window frames in green, walls in beige, decorations in blue. The window frames, walls and decorations should all actually be the same building texture.
Go back into Front view in Edit mode, select all vertices, and then Mesh -> UV Unwrap -> Project From View (Bounds). Your building should now be basically complete!
Set shading to Material and poke at any parts of the mesh that seem a bit wonky. For example I moved the top section backwards and narrowed the y component in a few sections like the tip of the spire.
