Part of the reason for the constant changes to the illustrations was that I had some ideas in my head of the sort of environment that I wanted to portray. After visiting Ohio and spending some time driving through the backroads and seeing the landscape, there were some specific feelings and atmosphere that I wanted to get right. I struggled to strike the right balance and kept tweaking and editing to match what I saw in my head. I also wanted to represent the changing landscape via the farming season and how the planting, growing, and harvesting of the crops alter how the site is experienced. What started out as six images ended up as three as I abandoned some and ran out of time with others. The narrative of the farming season is somewhat lost now, though I may revisit this idea later.

Each of the three illustrations contain very little 3d and instead relied heavily on large textures of each of the image landscape elements. Generally, it doesn’t really take long to stitch all of the components together. The secret is finding the elements at a high enough resolution or with the correct lighting and perspective. Once the textures are compiled, it is all about toning. I have come to realize that careful toning of each component plays a significant role in getting the image as a whole to feel cohesive and natural. The more I create images, the larger percentage of my time is spent adjusting color, lighting, and levels of each individual texture. In the past, I would rely on general effects and atmosphere to hide the discontinuity of the textures but this approach leads to unnatural and “Photoshopped” looking images.

Below are the final images followed by the Black and White versions.

Black and White

I also start out many of my sections with these grand plans to use lots of color but I ultimately end up making them black and white. There is a lot going on in section illustrations to the point that adding color can get a bit busy and overpowering. desaturating the sections maintains some of that diagrammatic feel. I even tried adding color to just the section cut, but this made the cut pop way too much and again became too distracting.

I created two building sections for the MIT project. To switch things up a little, I layered in lots of fog and atmospheric lighting. Part of why I created these sections was to force me to figure out the interior floor plan and spaces which I have been putting off ever since I started this project. I was going to generate some perspective floor plans for this post as well but ran out of time. Below are some of the base files I used create the section illustrations. Because these illustrations are more diagrammatic, this put less pressure on needing to develop a detailed model for the interiors.

To start things out, I really only needed 3 base renderings from V-Ray: A rendering of the model with no materials, and rendering with materials turned on, and a Material ID rendering for making quick and easy selections.

I started with the clay rendering and adjusted the levels to increase the contrast. The idea being that I wanted the highights on the section cut to read more strongly against the darker interior spaces.

Next, I layered in materials and textures. Some of this came from the V-Ray base rendering with materials. Others came from manually photoshopping in dirt and grunge. I also added in a dark sky and gave a gradient to the section cut.

At this point, the image was getting too dark so I started to lighten things up with another levels adjustment, but by also painting in some fog across the entire image. You can also see the sky now has much more of a gradient as well. The left back building was also lightened to create more of a contrast between the background and foreground elements.

The second layering of fog focused on texture and overall image gradient. I wanted the building to feel like it was receding so fog was painted in more more heavily on the right side. As I was painting in the thick fog, I was also switching between dark and light paint so that an overall gradient of light to dark started to appear. Light was focused at the top right of the image, and vignetting in the bottom left. Finally, some additional texturing using miscellaneous cloud textures was used to give the fog some complexity. This texturing was very subtle but really goes a long way in giving the fog a more natural feel.

I ended up taking the second section cut a little lighter, but still very foggy. This image was originally rendered out as a horizontal layout but the proportions and composition felt off so I significantly cropped things out on the right.

And below are some of my past sections including one only seen in Portfolio Volume 05

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I also generated a before and after semi-photoreal illustration of the site plan. Again, because I had modeled most of the geometry, generating these illustrations didn’t take too long. Plus, I like the visual contrast of the abstract diagrams next to the realistic illustrations of the site. Google Earth was used to create many of the textures such as the rubber roofs of the existing context buildings and to age the ground paving and vegetation a bit.

For maximum flexibility, I rendered with both soft and sharp shadows. Sometimes, especially with diagrams, shadows can be distracting and impact clarity so I wanted to have both options ready to go.

Before and After Illustrations

The MIT project that I designed is a large intervention on the campus and I thought a before-and-after series of images would help illustrate this idea. As I mentioned above, I extracted a ton of textures from Google Earth screenshots to more accurately depict rooftops and other misc. textures.

Graphic Iterations

Once the before-and-after illustrations were completed, I switched modes and started experimenting. Above all else, I wanted to study color combinations and texture levels as well as test out styles that ranged from minimalist to full on texture and complexity. My Photoshop file had lots of groups and masks setup so that I could adjust colors and textures rapidly. Again, this took a little more time upfront to setup, however, it allowed for super clean edits that didn’t get messy and confusing after hours of playing around. More importantly, it allowed me to really fine tune and dial in things because I had full control of every color and texture. Below are some of the images that were generated from this exercise.

Crops