

A clever fellow called Qarl figured out how to make a custom snowglobe of his family's house as a surprise gift for his wife. He auto-modelled it in Google Sketchup, cleaned it up some, added a snowy hill, sent the model to a 3D printing company, and popped it in a snowglobe kit. Voila!

1) order a custom snowglobe kit. ebay has a bunch to choose from. try to find one that tells you its exact dimensions so you can size your model before the globe arrives in the mail.

2) take pictures of your house. you probably want at least eight circling the perimeter. more can't hurt.



i also grabbed a top-down view of my house from google's satellite maps. it's very low-res, but the house is going to be tiny, so it works out.

3) build a cg model of your house.



i tried a handful of the "automatic" systems to build models. microsoft's photosynth, autodesk's 123D catch, a couple lesser known programs. none of them worked well enough to produce a final model – they did well for 75% of the model, but then horribly mutilated the last 25%.

in the end i went with google's sketchup – its photo match tools are great for building models from photos of buildings.