The actual project was built in 1986, in Merida, Spain, by spanish Architect Rafael Moneo, Pritzker Prize winner in 1996. It will be referred to as the Roman Museum for simplicity (lazyness) purposes.

Link towards 3D model files for download

Virtual tour of the National Museum of Roman Art 3D model, once modeled and rendered in Unreal Engine :

The impulse of the project

Being still architecturally learning (i.e. ignorant), I had never really come across the name of Rafael Moneo or known anything about the National Museum of Roman Art in Merida.

I actually found it by chance in a « Visionary architects of the XXth century » book and got stuck on the Rafael Moneo double page. One short biography and project descriptions on the side and a full page picture of this project :

It immediately made me want to know more about it. The drawing seemed so pure, classic yet modern, very compelling. The shape and design of the arches appeared as the perfect architectural response to what the project was : a XX^th century museum about roman art.

Getting started on the model

Once that first impulse really kicked in, I began to look for more information about the Museum, the conception of the spaces, the floor plans, the sections, to find out that the scale of the building was actually pretty large.

Also, I really wanted to learn how to model in 3D what I saw. At that point, it was only the one picture with the brick walls and arches but it did seem to present some challenges.

Yet again, learn to model while learning about the model.

3D model challenges for the Roman Museum

The real difficulty here wasn’t really the modeling part. The arches were very manageable, most of the walls, beams, rails and grounds are made of solid straight lines, nothing too fancy.

The problem came with the rendering of the brick walls, that are the main aesthetic component of the whole interior.

The walls are covered in bricks, seemingly in the roman style, but those bricks actually cover concrete walls, and they are not connected with visible mortar. Besides, their color variation is totally random all over the place.

There lied the difficulty : how to transcribe both the deep imperfect geometry of the bricks and more importantly their random colors.

3D modeling solution for the bricks

I’ll spare you the few days of trial and error that led me to the one satisfying solution (might have been more) I found in 3dsmax :

• Combining the FloorGenerator plugin, with parameters related to the actual bricks’ height and length, with an extrusion the size of half the wall’s thickness
• Edit poly modifiers to make the symmetry
• Capping the holes
• Use the Material by Element modifier (randomize x8 ID material with different starting points)
• Apply a Vray Multisub material with one texture, randomized over 8 color variations. Those variations are gained from a series of 8 grey textures that overlay the original beige one, thus giving a series of colors along the same tone.

On both the arches and the walls, each brick being a separate element in the editable poly, with a separate material ID (from the Material by element modifier). Couldn’t achieve the same result with one simple textured material.

The result came along pretty well and answered the need of both imperfection (throught the Floor generator parameters) and randomization (through the multisub material and the different material IDs).

Nevertheless, considering the enormous amount of geometry those bricks represent (millions of polygons overall), I had to transform them into Vray proxies in order to keep the main 3dsmax file manageable. The proxies don’t take any space memory wise but they render perfect.

Modeling the details

With that rendering technique out of the way, I now had to focus on the recreation of the museum spaces.

Although in the beginning I wanted to do only one arched wall, I kept expanding the scale of the model more and more, absorbing any interesting detail along the way : the metal rails, the stairs, the roof, the lamps, the chairs, the furniture.

Those details add a lot to a model when you can see the attention of the design in each of them. I then continued to model the museum by adding the exhibition area, the tunnel entrance, then the entrance building, etc.

Populating the model

Populating the model is important to make it feel more real and more lived in. For the roman exhibits, I managed to download roman sculptures from the Quixel Megascans library which was pretty handy to fill up a little bit my now huge museum space. Fbx imports with attached quality materials.

Then, I added a little bit of population from the software ANIMA, where I imported the museum geometry for the environment, placed a few people here and there and saved the project.

Finally, reimported those digital people back into 3dsmax (Anima plug in for 3dsmax), with realistic textures and nice integration with the lighting and scenery.

Final results

The results are those last Vray renders, in which we can see the nice random brick texturing (key of this model) and overall scale of the space with human reference :

In the end, I circled through the whole building, from the basement to the 3rd floor, and closed a rectangular terrain around all the recreated façades to make it one huge model.

Most of the modeling attention was dedicated to the exhibition area which is already around 2800m², but it was still interesting to see how the rest of the museum, the more technical and workplace areas, were organized around it, on all levels.

Conclusion

• The native model was entirely made in Sketchup. Great for drawing freely and extruding 2D base files. Not great for rendering randomized colored-bricks though.
• Transition skp to 3dsmax : a little tedious to keep the layer organization. Material conversions works pretty well. Still pretty tedious though.
• 3dsmax : dealing with large amounts of polygons (bricked walls), it becomes a nightmare to work between the crashes and the render times.
• Making good use of Vray proxies to lighten the file by reducing brick detailed walls to simple 500 face polygons
• Vray Rendering : Vray multisub for the randomized brick textures, VrayDenoiser to clean up.
• Bonus 1 : populating with roman sculptures from a free library (Quixel Megascans) help with the realism of the model
• Bonus 2 : populating the model with the Anima software people is quite simple and gives pretty good looking results

Even if I still am satisfied with the end results for the renders, next time, I’ll try to scale the project down, or at least chop it up in several parts, to make it more workable.

Architecture wise, the lessons of the Roman Museum will be the object of another post of the Instructive modeling series : 10 lessons from the National Museum of Roman Art 3D model.

Now that I feel like I’ve spent enough time over there in Merida,

I’ll move on and see you on the next one,