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
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 XXth 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 bricked walls and arches but it did seem to present some challenges.
Basically, 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 their random colors.
3D modeling solution
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 and cap the holes
- Material by Element modifier (randomize x8 ID)
- Apply Vray Multisub material with one texture, randomized over 8 color variations
1. Draw the arch in sketchup 
2. Report length of side arch 
3. Floor Generator plug in to make the bricks 
4. Symetry to make it on both sides of the wall 
5. Bend modifier to get the correct shape 
6. Material by element modifier to randomize mat ID by element to randomize textures 
1. Same with the whole wall 
2. Start from one flat polygon in 3dsmax 
3. Floor generator plugin to make the bricks, same parameters 
3. Symetry to make the whole wall 
4. Material by element modifier 
5. On a big wall like this, the polycount is quite large 
6. Vray material with multisub textures 
7. First test render in Vray using 
8. Render of the wall + the arcades in 3dsmax Vray
On both the arches and the walls, each brick being a separate element, with a separate material ID. Couldn’t achieve the same result with one simple textured material.
Getting finished with the model
With that rendering technique out of the way, I still had to focus on the recreation of the museum spaces.
Although in the beginning I had only one wall in mind, 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 furniture, even the roman exhibits.
The exhibition area, then the tunnel entrance, then the entrance building, etc.
I ended up circling the whole building, from the basement to the 3rd floor, and closed a rectangular terrain around all the recreated façades to make it one big closed 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, was organized around it, on all levels.
Conclusion
Modeling wise :
- 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, but the workflow still improved a bit. Material conversions works pretty well.
- 3dsmax : dealing with large amounts of polygons (bricked walls), it becomes a nightmare to work between the crashes and the render times.
- Vray Rendering : thank god there are Vray proxies and VrayDenoiser
- Bonus : populating the model with the Anima software is very 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 visited enough of Merida,
I’ll move on and see you on the next one,
[email protected]
XW