Creating Low Poly Houses and Buildings

Time to build some buildings.

This will be one of the easier chapters. After all, buildings are tall cubes with some details, right?

In this chapter, you’ll learn about the basic parts of a building. You’ll learn how to cut out windows, make roofs, and add some details to your buildings.

In this chapter, you’ll learn to do the following:

• Build two different low poly skyscrapers from scratch
• Add details to the skyscrapers
• Create a simple house
• Make windows and roofs

We’ll start by going over all the different parts that buildings have.

What it takes

Buildings are simple.

They’re tall cubes, more or less. However, they’re still recognizable shapes—not just any random cube will do. They’re generally taller than they are wide, and usually have a lot of windows.

There are many different kinds of buildings. The options are almost limitless when it comes to designing yours.

The buildings we’ll be making here are going to be extremely simple—the kind you might use in the background of a scene.

I suggest looking at some buildings. Any buildings. Use what you see as inspiration for your own brand-new building designs.

There are not many parts to a building: the main cube-shaped part (the walls), the top (the roof), and the details, like the windows and doors.

It’s the same for houses. For houses, however, it’s common to have a more complex shape, more like two or three cubes of different sizes all stuck together.

We’ll make a few different...

The easy building – a skyscraper

Our first building is an easy skyscraper. It looks like this:

Figure 10.2 – The final skyscraper

I hear you. “That’s not a building! It’s a telephone booth!” Well, it’s a very simple building. By itself, this building might not even obviously be a building, but if you used it in a grouping of other simple, stylized buildings (as in Figure 10.1), it would work just fine. The neat lines running around the edges help it seem a little like a building, but it is just a box.

With buildings like houses, the roof is extremely important. But on a skyscraper, like the one we’ll be modeling, there’s nothing special you have to do for the roof, since it’s not angled or overhanging like most houses. It doesn’t even need to be a separate object. This means that skyscrapers are easier to make than houses. We will add some details to the top of this building...

The complicated building

This project is different—it’s more complex. Here’s what our complicated building looks like:

Figure 10.6 – The complicated building

To make this building, we’ll first make the inner orange part. It’s just a simple adjusted cube. Then, we’ll make the outer part shown in the following figure, with the cut-out ‘‘holes’’ in it, and put that on top. The whole process should be fairly simple.

Figure 10.7 – The two parts: the outer white and inner orange pieces

We’ll make the outer cover by duplicating part of the inner piece, so you’ll learn some new tools for separating objects.

Creating the inner part

First, we’ll make the inner part. Once it’s complete, we’ll work on the outer shell. We’ll start with a cube, just like we did for the first building:

1. Tab into Edit...

Modeling building details

Our simple and complex buildings look cool, but we can make them even better. They’re very simple right now (which is good, for this style). However, we can add a few additional details to them here and there, retaining the simple look while adding a bit of interest.

We’re going to build three different detail pieces that you can add to your buildings. First, we’ll make a little rooftop doorway, like the kind you find on top of buildings, then we’ll make a simple vent-type piece. The options with details like these are limitless—you can do so many different things. Anything that’s small and fairly interesting does the job well. But keep things simple. Details are usually small enough that nobody will notice them.

You can look at photos of real buildings to get ideas—maybe you’ll come up with something new and interesting.

Modeling a rooftop doorway

Let’s work on the doorway first. It...

The cottage

Now we’re going to build a simple little cottage. It’s not much different from the buildings. I’ll walk you through the steps and you’ll be able to build it easily.

It’ll have a few parts:

• The main walls—made of a cube
• The roof—made of a plane
• The windows and door (simple cubes)

Let’s dive in.

Creating the main walls

First, let’s build a pointy-topped cube:

1. Start with a cube.
2. Tab into Edit Mode and cut a single loop across the cube using the Loop Cut tool, so that you have a cut across the top of the cube.
3. Now switch to Edge Select mode, select the new edge you created, and move it upward using the G command.

You now have a pointy cube!

Creating the roof

Now we need the roof. It won’t be too difficult to make. We’ll create it by duplicating the top faces of the cube, turning those into a new object, and expanding it.

Here’s...

Summary

In this chapter, you became a builder. You learned how to make a skyscraper, working from scratch to build a whole building. You built a house, one piece at a time. You learned how to make windows, doors, and other building details.

Great job making it through the chapter!

If you only remember one thing from this chapter, it is that that buildings (in the world of low poly) are essentially cubes. And you can make an interesting building out of an interesting cube.

In the next chapter, you’re going to learn how to use the Asset Browser to store and organize all your assets.

Solution to the building challenge

Here are the steps to complete the complex building challenge:

1. Create a very tall cube for the body of the building.
2. Add another cube. Scale it up so it is wider than the first cube, then scale it down on the Z axis to make it thin.
3. Move the thin cube down on the Z axis so that it is at the base of the tall cube. We will now use an Array modifier to duplicate it upward and create the rest of the thin cubes.
4. Add an Array modifier to the thin cube. Change the offset setting on the modifier to 0 for X and Y and 1.8 for the Z value.
5. Turn up the count on the Array modifier to increase the number of thin cubes.
6. Once you’re happy, apply the modifier to make it permanent, then move the stacked-thin-cubes object upward so that the very top thin cube looks like a roof on the building.

Done!