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 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

Below is a break down of the image and a closer look at the process I used to create the snowy walkway.

1. 3D Model

The one thing I wanted to point out in this screenshot is that I am using 3D people in the interior. The view point into the lower café was too difficult to find people at the proper angle to Photoshop in. Therefore, I fully modeled the interior and dropped in 3D people to avoid the headache of trying to stitch 2D people into that scene.

2. Base Rendering

I built the dark steel material from scratch because I had a very specific look that I was going for. That material carries through the entire project so I needed it to be high quality and large enough to not show tiling. I also built the paver material in the sunken plaza from scratch and created a reflection map to give the texture a wet look.

3. Snow

The process of adding the snow began with setting up a material override in V-Ray for some of the ground textures so that it renders out white. I wanted to create the effect of people’s footprints creating a slushy path through the plaza. The plan was to mask away the white material override rendering to reveal the wet stone material below.

I searched through Google and built up a library of images of people’s footprints through the snow. I then began bringing them into Photoshop, desaturating the color, and built a black and white image of how I wanted the snow to be masked away. White represents where the snow would stay and the black represents where the snow would be masked away revealing the wet ground below.

Once the black and white image was complete, I simply copied it into the “Layer Mask” of the white material override layer.

4. Final Snow Details

With the plaza at a good place, I added in the remaining snow details such as the snow collecting on the horizontal surfaces and in the corners of the scene.

5. Texture Refinement

As much as I tried to get things resolved in 3D, there was still tweaking I needed to do over many of the materials. This mostly consisted of adding in imperfections such as adjusting the reflection in some of the steel panels, aging the brick façade, and adding dirt stains along the roof line. I also reworked the glass to resolve some of the reflection issues and added details inside the space.

6. Trees and People

This part went relatively fast but I did realize that I need a better winter tree library. I ended up copying the same few trees over and over again.

7. Final Image

I applied very little final effects or color grading to the image. I did push the image a little darker just because I wanted to play up the contrast of the dark steel with the bright white sky. I think the mood landed right where I was aiming and didn’t require any drastic atmospheric effects or coloring.

Past Winter Specials

Winter Special #8

Winter Special #7

Winter Special #6

Winter Special #5

Winter Special #4

Winter Special #3

Winter Special #2

Winter Special #1

In the breakdown below, I spend some time describing some important tips for placing grass textures in an aerial view such as this. Things can get very very overwhelming and messy if you don’t stay organized and focused. Normally for images created on this website, I create them in a few days. However, with this one, I worked on it over several weekends and many weekday nights. Part of it was that I needed to step away from the illustration and then come back next day with a fresh pair of eyes. It helped to reset my focus and see the image as a big picture composition instead of getting lost in the details.

1. Base Rendering

The first thing you may notice is that I used 3D trees which is something I do not do often. The reality was that there were too many trees to add in Photoshop and the angle was awkward enough that a couple off areas would have been too difficult to manage in 2D. So, I used 3D trees to get a good base going but then added some Photoshop trees later in locations that I wanted to have more control and flexibility with.

2. Mapping Grass Textures

Something a lot of people overlook when adding in ground textures is they often fail to match the perspective of the texture to the perspective of the Illustration. Something that helps me match perspectives especially when dealing with topographic landscapes is to overlay a gridded texture in the 3D model.

With grassy textures, it can sometimes be difficult to ready the perspective, but there are usually enough cues to make a solid guess. In the texture above I drew a square mapping the chunk of the texture that I am cutting out doing my best to estimate what a 90 degree rectangle would look like overlaid onto the ground.

Once that texture is brought into the illustration, it is pretty clear that the perspective of the texture does not match the perspective of the illustration. However, this would be much more difficult to visualize with the grid turned off and and the full texture image just dragged into the illustration without taking the times to estimate what the perspective is.

To get the texture perspective to match the illustration perspective, I use “Edit>Transform>Distort” in Photoshop. With all of this said, the above texture is just an example and I am usually not this literal with lining things up or cutting textures out. Instead, I am simply just visually trying to explain what I am doing in my head when adding these grass textures in Photoshop.

For images with lots of topography, I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to adjust the perspective of the textures to match the illustration. With the second texture that I am showing on the back side of the hill, I flattened it significantly to match how the grid compresses as it goes down the back side of the hill. All of this is subtle, but really helps to keep the topography reading clearly when so many textures are being overlaid on top of the base rendering.

3. Build a Huge Library of Textures

I already have a large library of textures, but for this image, I needed better textures. For grass textures in particular, it is hard to find high quality textures of the right kind of grass that looks good from a distance and also when zoomed in. I must have spent several hours looking through images search and using different key words to try to find just the right images. However, starting with good textures makes my time in Photoshop a lot less painful.

4. Stitching Everything Together

As I mentioned above, this was a lot of work but I prefer to approach this kind of image by slowly layering and building up textures. In many areas of the image, there are probably three or four layers of textures being seen. This helps to blend things together and create complexity while not seeing too many repeating images. At the same time you have to be careful not to let things get muddy. This is easy to do when layering so many images on top of one another and there is no real secret to avoiding this except to practice.

5. Details

Final details included adding in the 2D trees in a few locations as well as inserting the background. I was able to find an image that I then reworked so that it related and blended into the landscape that I created in the foreground.

6. Final Image

I went back and forth on whether to go bright and cheery with this image or dark and moody. Ultimately, pushed the illustration a little more in the dark and moody direction because I think it helped amp up the drama of the landscape.

This was one of the main images I had in mind when I first started designing this project. I kept putting it off because I knew it would be a beast to take on. As is often the case, the final illustration is very different than what I had in my head going into this. Even with the clearest plans, I am always amazed how images evolve through the image making process.

I have used many methods for illustrating glass in my images depending on the type of illustration I am creating: interior, exterior, daytime, night, overcast, bright, etc. However, in situations where the glass is prominent in the images, and I intend to extensively edit what is going on behind it, I like to rebuild the glass completely in Photoshop. What I mean by rebuild is that I do not work over rendered glass baked into the base files, but instead render the scene without glass and then bring it in as a layer or multiple layers in Photoshop. This gives me complete control over editing behind the glass, making selections, and the reflection on the glass itself. This also means that you need to have a good grasp of how glass will act in certain situations and adjust the reflection/transparency balance accordingly.

For the Texas Prairie Bridge illustration below, there was a lot of editing happening behind the glass, so I rebuilt it by rendering passes with the glass turned both on and off. I used the rendering passes with the glass turned off for my base images. I only used the reflection render element from the “Glass TURNED ON” rendering passes so that I could bring in that reflection as a layer.

1. Setup the Model to Render With and Without Glass

As mentioned aboved, I rendered two sets of base files with the glass turned both on and off. I then used the render passes with the glass turned “off” as the base images in Photoshop. The idea is that I will be editing the interiors behind the glass and I do not want to edit over the glass reflections.

2. Edit Image Behind the Glass

Not rendering the glass means I can get nice crisp material ID’s to make precise selections so that I can drop in the background vegetation, insert people, and tone the interior spaces.

3. Bring in the Reflections

Once the elements behind the glass were in place, I began bringing in the glass reflections. I first opened the “Material ID” render element from the “Glass On” rendering pass so that I could select the glass in the scene and setup a mask over a group in Photoshop to hold the glass edits. Once the group was in place, I first brought in the “Reflection” render element and set the Layer Blend Mode to “Screen”. This instantly gives the images that glassy effect. You can duplicate the layer or adjust the opacity to refine how strong the reflection is.

5. Glass Haze

One of the things I wanted to do in this illustration is amp up the conference room “Bridges” by giving them a blue tint. To do this though, I need to paint in some haze to give the blue color something to stick too. The haze also gives the glass more of a presence in the images which I do sometimes if the glass is feeling too transparent and clean. To create the haze, I just used a soft paint brush with very low opacity and slowing added white paint to the glass.

6. Add the Blue

Finally, I used the soft paint brush and slowly layered on some blue paint to the bridges. I set the Layer Blend Mode to “Overlay” which gave the glass a blue tint.

7. Final Image

I don’t always render a glass and no-glass pass for all of my images. However, in situations like this where I want to have full control of the glass and what is happening behind the glass, this method works best for me. For exterior images where there is lots of light and geometry going on behind the camera, I will actually edit the reflections to add trees, people, and sky textures. There are some tips to doing this successfully and perhaps I will revisit this in later posts.