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

You can get more information on the book and see some of the final spreads by visiting my store

I am usually pretty good about managing my time and setting internal deadlines for myself, especially when it comes to renderings. However, with this book, I have become obsessed with having every square inch of it designed. This includes designing the table of contents, the title page, the forward, and all of the other non-project pages. For each one of those spreads I am creating multiple iterations to get to the final design.

I should also point out that with this portfolio and many of my others, I purposely don’t setup a conceptual framework that then informs the design and layout of all of the spreads throughout the entire book. Instead, I treat each spread as its own style which gives me freedom to explore with a lot of different ideas and experiment with multiple graphic approaches. This makes for what I think is an interesting book to look through as well as a place to pull ideas from. But, it also means it takes a lot of time to work through and design of each spread.

The one part of my portfolios that I always seem to get lost in the design of is the cover. Partly because I realize the importance of the cover and partly because I always struggle with how complex or minimal to go with it. Early on when I was in school, I tended to go more complex. Today, I lean minimal. Because the interior pages have such highly textured, colored, a geometrically rich graphics, I like the idea of contrasting the interior pages with a super simple cover. With that said, whether the cover is minimal or complex, I always have a ton of ideas, many of which I fall in love with early on and have trouble distilling down to one final choice. If it were up to me, I would print 10 different books all with different covers, but that obviously isn’t practical.

I see these portfolios all the time, so when I design them, they first and foremost must be something that I enjoy looking at. With my last portfolio, volume 04, it was extremely minimal and really came down to color. To this day, I like that red just as much as the first day I saw it.

For Portfolio 05, I am leaning towards cool blue hues for the cover. I still have not decided whether I am going to relate the style to the Volume 04 cover or go with something completely different. There are positives and negatives to both options. Below is the group of designs that I have narrowed it down to. The final will most likely be some combination of the options below.

View Option 01 and 02: Street Level Looking North and West

The first set of views that I looked at were at street level looking up the tiered seating. The problem with these angles was that too much of the upper level was out of view. The view looking more down the street was more interesting to me, but both images felt too disconnected from the “action” happening at the upper level. Compositionally I liked them. They just were not succeeding in telling the story of this area.

View Option 03: Street Level Looking South

A key idea of this zone of the pedestrian bridge is how a large proportion of the foot traffic will flow up and down the ramp and wrap around the convention center as marked by the dark red line. This view shows this relationship well and I liked the idea of placing the large sloped grassy area in the foreground. However, similar to the other street level views, I still felt it was too disconnected from the upper terrace.

View Option 04 and 05: Aerials

Next, I looked at some aerials views. The aerials did a good job of clarify all of the geometry and probably explained this area of the site the best. However, there were two problems. First, there was a large amount of context that I would need to define. I had limited time to generate this image and I couldn’t spend all of it on the city in the background. The other problem was that the aerials did not feel intimate enough. This is the case in general with most aerials. I wanted the viewer to really connect with the space and feel like they were there. These aerial options, while compositionally interesting, would not have provided that intimacy I was looking for but instead, would have felt more diagrammatic.

View 06: Upper Level

I moved the camera to the upper level since this is where a lot of the action would be happening, but the tiered seating ended up being steeper than expected and was completely cut out of the view. I needed to get pretty close to the edge for the seating to appear again. I looked into placing the camera on the hill to the right, but it still was not high enough to capture the seating.

View 07: Raised Upper Level

One option to get the tiered seating into view was to raise the camera. While this was closer to the ground than the other aerials, the same problem remained. The view felt too disconnected from the project and was at a vantage point that visitors would not experience.

View 08: The Chosen One

Ultimately, this view checked all of the boxes. Compositionally, it wasn’t my favorite, but it told the best story. The ramp cuts across the scene and wraps around the convention center. The upper level is in view as well as the tiered seating and large grass hill. The viewer can see the relationship of the bridge to the Convention center but the bridge is still the focal point. I also knew that I could use the trees and people to help frame the view and strengthen the composition.

V-Ray Rendering

With the view decided, I rendered out the base image. As I mentioned before, I didn’t have a lot of time to piece this illustration together. The model was simple, but I did take some time to add some details to the ground plane such as the stone edging. Most everything else would be handled in Photoshop.

Photoshop

There was a lot of Photoshop that went into this illustration. The vegetation was intense, but helped add lots of texture to the image. I wanted the space to be activated, but I didn’t over-do it with entourage. With so much going on in the image, too many people could have hurt the flow of the scene.

Black and White

I didn’t mind the color version, but I really liked the image in Black and White. The light and shadow reads better in my opinion. I still haven’t decided which option will go in the portfolio though.

I don’t create many interior illustrations on this site partly because interiors require well resolved models with lots of detail. I can’t simply rely on Photoshop to fill in information of interiors like I do for exteriors. This usually translates to more time, and since all of the work on this site is done in my free-time, I tend to steer clear of a lot of interior work. However, with the Desert House Project, I felt more resolved and realistic interior images were needed to close out the narrative.

While I didn’t have a lot of time to break down these images, I still wanted to post them here rather then keeping them hidden in the portfolio. I am including images of what the Sketchup model and base renderings looked like so that you can get a sense of how much the 3D model was developed versus how little things were manipulated in Photoshop.

01. Original Abstract Images

The above illustrations were first created a while back to explore some color and texture ideas as well as get a quick sense of the interior volumes. I still plan to put these illustrations into the portfolio, but I also need something a little more real to better explain the final result. The original post for these abstract images can be found Here.

2. Sketchup Model

Upon revisiting the interiors, I started with adding more detail such as window mullions, high poly furniture, and better textures. I already had much of the interior built from when I generated exterior images. However, I added a louver system on the inside ceiling to help relate to the exterior louver system and to also help define some of the larger spaces inside. A fireplace and stair were also added in.

I really don’t like seeing textures repeat aka tiling, so I ended up building two large textures for the wood floors and plaster walls. . Each texture is made up of several smaller textures copied/cloned/overlaid together and setup to be seamless. I also made corresponding bump and reflection maps.

3. V-Ray Base Renderings

The scenes are largely lit by the sun to highlight the fact that even though the project is recessed into the ground, lots of natural light still gets in. For the kitchen view (seen below) I did add some additional interior lights to create some strong focal points in that view. Above, the image on the left is straight out of V-Ray while the image on the right shows some quick level adjustments I did before starting the Photoshop work.

4. Photoshop

I started with the vegetation in Photoshop because I figured this might help inform what I do with the entourage. I focused on strong highlights and shadow with the vegetation to help dramatize these areas and draw attention as these are key features to the design. The entourage was limited to just a few people in each scene. In this case, I placed just one person off to the side and relatively small in the composition to help play up the grandness of the space.

5. Final Adjustments

Finally, I didn’t want to lose out on the vibrancy and strong colors that many of the other images of this project have, so I increased the color saturation of these interiors quite a bit. I especially wanted the warm tones of the plaster and wood to pop, so I increased those areas even more. Also, the detail was intensified by running some Topaz Filters at the very end.

Below is a quick break down of the illustration and the simple process I used to create the aerial forest.

1. Base Rendering

I first setup the view in Sketchup and rendered it out using V-Ray. I also dropped in some trees (hidden in this view) to cast some shadows on the roof. I could have Photoshopped in these shadows but decided to go the 3D route because of all of the geometry happening on the roof.

2. Ground Vegetation

Next, I setup a new group in Photoshop and added in some ground vegetation. I wasn’t too concerned about how clean the Photoshop was on the vegetation because it was largely going to get covered up with trees. The texture is made up of about three images Cloned Stamped together.

3. Ground Shadows

The first thing I typically do when setting up the ground shadows is to extract the shadows from the base rendering. In this case, I grabbed the shadow that the building was casting on the ground, brought it into my “Ground Vegetation” Group, and set the layer blend mode to “Multiply”.

Since there will be a lot of trees covering the site, there will also be lots of tree shadows on the ground. Therefore, I created a tree shadow by taking one of my cutout trees, darkening it, giving it a blue tint to match the ground shadows of the base rendering, and finally added some motion blur. Once I had the tree shadow ready to go, I simply copied it untill the ground was mostly covered.

One quick tip, I setup a new group to contain all of the shadows including the ground shadows from the base rendering. All of the Layer Blend Modes of the individual shadow layers were set to “Normal” so that they did not multiply on top of themselves. I then set the group Layer Blend Mode to “Multiply” to get the final effect.

4. Adding Trees

I compiled five cutout trees that were more or less the type that I need for the forest. Some were older and some were younger for some more diversity. I then copied them throughout the site making sure that I was angling the trunks to match the perspective of the image. Since I only had five different trees, I did a lot of flipping and toning to avoid the trees feeling too copied.

I created a tutorial a while ago going into more depth on this idea of avoiding that copied look Here.

5. Roof Gardens

The steps used to add in the roof gardens were identical to those used to add the ground vegetation and shadow. I compiled a group of textures, stitched them into the illustration, and then multiplied the base render shadows on top. I also reworked some of the glass and brought in a few people.

6. Final Toning

Finally, I adjusted the toning of the image. Not much was done here though. I adjusted the contrast, ran some Topaz filters to pull out some detail, and added a slight atmospheric haze over the entire image.