Help with designing stadiums

[Frizza]

Hello,

I have only recently joined this forum but have been visiting for a long time, especially in the Stadium Design Thread. For my studies, I am now required to design a soccer stadium, and was just after some help/advice to get me started. So heres a few questions I have:

What design program(s) is the best? Easiest? Recommended I use?
Is there a manual/document I can download to guide me through designing a stadium with said program?
What render program(s) are recommended?

Also, I aspire to (eventually) designing something with a finished product as good as the picture below. Realistically, do I have any chance of being able to do this if i spend say 3 months on this project (or maybe being able to create one so detailed as that, but with a smaller capacity of under 10,000)?


Thankyou in advance.

[artet]

Originally Posted by Frizza

Hello,

I have only recently joined this forum but have been visiting for a long time, especially in the Stadium Design Thread. For my studies, I am now required to design a soccer stadium, and was just after some help/advice to get me started. So heres a few questions I have:

What design program(s) is the best? Easiest? Recommended I use?
Is there a manual/document I can download to guide me through designing a stadium with said program?
What render program(s) are recommended?

Also, I aspire to (eventually) designing something with a finished product as good as the picture below. Realistically, do I have any chance of being able to do this if i spend say 3 months on this project (or maybe being able to create one so detailed as that, but with a smaller capacity of under 10,000)?


Thankyou in advance.

Well for best and recommended free 3d program you have Blender 2.49b. You can google for blender tutorials to learn how to use it.

For easiest and also free you have google sketchup, though i don't recommend this due to its limitations specially with bigger scene/projects.

For payed software i recommend 3ds max (the one i use) or modo 401. For 3ds max i highly recommend the tutorials of Ben Tate - http://www.bentateonline.com/CG_Education.html

You can also look deeper for tutorials for various 3d software in http://cg.tutsplus.com/category/tutorials/


For the tutorial documents for stadiums, i have been making stadiums for about 10 years and never came across with one.

But you will find in the 3d stadium design forum some documents with technical info for designing stadiums with FIFA standards.

For rendering programs it depends on the software you choose, but the most recommended for architectural visualization are definitely VRay and Mental Ray. Vray is payed and Mental Ray comes with 3ds Max and Maya.

For free renders you have LuxRender, YafaRay and Kerkythea.


To design a stadium with the detail of the one you used as example, 3 months are enough, since that one is far from being very detailed. But all depends on how skilled/experienced you are with your 3d program.

For a rendering of that quality you will have to spend a lot of time testing lights and tweaking materials for them to look realistic enough, and if you want fast renders you need a very fast/quality render engine like vray and a good processor with as much cores you can get, since actual render engines are cpu dependent.

It takes a lot more time to fully control a render engine than to learn architectural modeling.

[Swist]

What design program(s) is the best? Easiest? Recommended I use?
Is there a manual/document I can download to guide me through designing a stadium with said program?
What render program(s) are recommended?

Easiest to learn ist Google SketchUp. You can reader in plugin for it called V-ray.

It's a profesional project in this programe:
http://www.vimeo.com/8990030

If you understand polish ( google translate also can help you) you can learn how to design a stadium in ~ 2-3 hours by this web page:

http://www.swistakero-designs.cba.pl/2/3.html

It,s my web page. If anybody want to translate this page in english, can do it, but the translation must be integrated with existing site.


Sorry for my english,

[Frizza]

Thanks for the replies guys.
How would you recommend I go about applying textures for rendering? Build the stadium in SketchUp then apply textures/facades in 3ds max? Or does SketchUp aleady have textures in built?

[artet]

Originally Posted by Frizza

Thanks for the replies guys.
How would you recommend I go about applying textures for rendering? Build the stadium in SketchUp then apply textures/facades in 3ds max? Or does SketchUp aleady have textures in built?

Both programs bring some textures along.

If you are going to make the model with one program and then use other program to do texturing or render, you will find some problems on the way, depending on the file format you will be exporting/importing your model, like triangulated faces and faces turned to wrong side.

If you are going to render your model with a render engine for 3ds max then do the texturing with 3ds max, if not, use the one you are going to render with.

[Frizza]

Also, does 3ds Max have objects you can place into your model like SketchUp does (ie how you can import seats from 3D Warehouse and place them into your stadium)?

[artet]

Originally Posted by Frizza

Also, does 3ds Max have objects you can place into your model like SketchUp does (ie how you can import seats from 3D Warehouse and place them into your stadium)?

No, 3ds max doesn't have a "library" of models like sketchup.

But you can use models from 3D warehouse in 3ds max as long as you open them with sketchup and export them as .dxf, .obj, 3ds and .fbx, but this is only possible with sketchup pro version and not with free version.

Its also possible to find free models for 3ds max in sites like turbosquid.

Actually 3ds max handles more efficiently models with more polygons than sketchup does, and if you intend to make the chairs as 3d models, max as a fixture - proxys - that makes possible the use of models with lots of polygons with low impact on memory ram usage and viewport framerate.


I came across with a new 3d modeling program - Bonzai 3D - witch looks very similar to sketchup but more robust and advanced. You can check the videos here, they look impressive.

http://www.formz.com/products/bonzai...dFeatures.html