MultiHub Forum

I’ve been tasked with creating a detailed 3D model of our city’s historic opera house for an augmented reality walking tour, but I’m hitting a wall with the ornate façade. I’m using photogrammetry from my drone shots and Blender for cleanup, but the budget is tight—just $500 for software and cloud processing—and the limestone carvings under the dome are so weathered that the automatic mesh is a chaotic mess of holes and floating geometry. I have three weeks before the first client demo, and manually sculpting those intricate floral patterns and gargoyles is eating up all my time. I’m worried the result will either look like a plastic replica or I’ll miss the deadline trying to achieve museum-level accuracy.

Treat the facade as a texture-first challenge: extract a clean base mesh from drone data, fill holes, and retopo into a manageable shell. Bake high‑resolution relief into normal and displacement maps from closeups, then keep a few key sculpted details in Blender. Deliver two versions: a texture-driven close‑up model and a low‑poly proxy for the AR tour. All with existing tools.