Help with recreating a scene from Photo

#1

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to model the following scene and I’m having issues aligning the camera and proportions.

I’ve read tutorials on horizon lines and such, however those were simple rooms or scenes and I can’t seem to apply those rules here.
I tried to gather as many pictures as I could so that I could get a somewhat accurate height reference.

I found a shot from the other side with a person in it.

I estimated him to be 175cm tall. That handrail is up to his butt.
I am 183cm tall and my butt is 90cm from the ground.

183 / 175 = 1.0457
90 / 1.0457 = 86 cm.

I assume the beginning of the handrail is 86cm tall.
Further approximate calculations have led me to create this:

I made a simple scene in 3DS Max with:

  • a viewport background
  • 2 pillars approximately 3m away from each other
  • a 35mm physical camera

I was hoping to match up the pillars with the perspective and continue to work from there, however this has been the most frustrating part for me.
Any word of advice?

Here is the 3DS Max File
http://wikisend.com/download/762646/testing.max

Thanks!
(ps: it appears that the forum image-upload function isn’t functioning, hence why I had to use 3d-party file-storage)

#2

The above max file is a 2016 version.
Here’s a 2013 max file:
http://wikisend.com/download/423778/testing2.max

#3

Hi buddy the way to do this is via a technique called camera matching. There is a very good example how to this on autodesk website (the online manual).

Basically you load the image into 3dsmax as an image plane, use the camera matching tool, you will need to create lines that match the horizontal, vertical and depth of your image. Then the camera will be matched to the image and you can model the objects in the scene with less problems :smiley: