1. Sketchup Model

This image was composed in such a way to place emphasis on the view of the harbor with the architecture taking a secondary role. The Sketchup model therefore only consisted of the tiered seating, stone benches and light locations. The context in the distance will be added in Photoshop.

2. V-Ray Rendering

The V-Ray base rendering was basic as well showing a simple stone material covering most of the surfaces. I decided to add the grass in Photoshop because I wasn’t sure where exactly I wanted it to go. I figured I could iterate different design ideas faster in Photoshop by adjusting the mask vs baking it into the rendering.

3. Context

I used photos that I had taken a while ago for the background context. The time of day of these photos was the driving force of the overall tone and lighting of the scene. I actually had to patch several photos together to get the final background seen here.

4. Grass

To insert the grass, I first quickly masked in the general locations. The idea was that the grass strips would get less dense as the seating stepped closer the the water. Once I had the location dialed in, I selected a different paint brush shape and roughed up the edges of the mask to get rid of the sharp edges and give more dimension to the vegetation. This idea of roughing up the edges can be seen in one of my older video tutorials though I think it is time for an updated tutorial on this technique.

5. Lights

Although I modeled some lights, I ended up painting them in Photoshop so that I could have more control over their placement and density. Once the locations were finalized, I added a glow to the surrounding grass by painting in a simple color overlay. Finally, I added glow to the lights by using a soft paint brush with low opacity.

6. People

Entourage is important in defining the scale of the pier and overall atmosphere of the space. Due to the tiered seating, sizing the people properly was difficult. To solve this, I dropped in scale figures into the Sketchup model and exported an image to use as a guide in Photoshop.

7. Color

Color adjustments were minimal. I took the image to a slightly cooler range to match some of the other portfolio pages and added a slight haze in the distance. I didn’t want to deviate too far from the original photo colors used in the background photo.

Going into this new round of spreads, I want to continue this idea of mixing styles while still maintaining control and flow of the story. I will also be exploring portrait orientation. I have typically only designed portfolios in a landscape layout in the past. Portrait layout offers a lot more options and possibilities with the online printers which I plan to explore later on. Beyond printing options, I just want to see what other advantages and disadvantages there are with portrait vs. landscape.

Below is the first round of spreads of the wharf project. The tone of the spreads was set with the first image of the foggy morning illustration. The layouts still need to be refined but the structure and coloring are in place. This early assembly of the pages will also help me to determine what information is still missing and which images need to be created next.

I also wanted to make a quick anouncement that the softcover version of Portfolio Vol. 3 is sold out. There are only about 50 copies of the hardcover left so if you had your eye on one, now is the time to get it. Thanks to everyone who has already purchased a copy and helped support this site.

I have chosen two new views of my wharf design to show how it works. The mask is best applied at the very end which means a full illustration edge to edge is still necessary. This also means if the mask isn’t working, it is no big deal and can be removed without any harm to the illustration.

Below is the full frame base rendering before masking (desaturated to better show the masking).

The blue represents what I masked off. The mask was made by creating a new layer and moving it to the top of the other layers. I then selected the “Polygonal Tool” and began selecting areas that I wanted to mask. Once the selection was made, I filled in the selection with a white paint. I went through many of iterations testing out what areas should be masked and what works best compositionally. I experimented with softening the edges or lowering the opacity, however,  I ultimately preferred the crisp edges and the sharp contrast between the white and rendered areas.

It is a simple move, but one that completely changes the tone of the image.

The final illustrations were rendered with V-Ray at a resolution of 4500px X 2500px. I then tweaked colors, textures, and added people in Photoshop. Finally, I jumped into my Topaz Labs PS plugin to punch up the detail.

This was a fun image to work on and the breakdown is relatively straight forward. The big poetic moves such as fog and coloring come towards the end which is typically the case with images like this. There was a lot of prep in Photoshop such as refining textures, lighting, and adding entourage. But once those elements were in, some serious experimenting began to generate the final mood of the image. I have continued to tweak the image from the last post, focusing mostly on color. Because of the way this image was set up, the image is very flexible and could easily be manipulated into a dusk shot or even a night shot. However, for this breakdown, I will stay with the morning shot.

1. Composition

An often overlooked element of an architecture illustration is composition. Going into this image, I wanted to capture the scope of the project as much as I could showing the length of the pier as well as its relationship to the water and city. I also wanted to express the topographical elements of the design so I brought the camera as close to the water as I could while still being able to see the deck lighting. The image is positioned so that the horizon sits right on the lower 1/3 of the image. I knew I would be recreating the sky in Photoshop so I simply added more height to the canvas in Photoshop to shift the horizon to the lower 1/3 of the page. The center of the foreground building’s long facade is placed directly on the left hand 1/3 line of the image. After finishing the image, I realized the real focal point was actually the green wall in shadow. It would have been ideal to place this directly on the left hand 1/3 line instead of the other facade. This could have been accomplished by cropping the shot, but I wanted to keep as much of the docks and city towers as possible, so I left it as is.

2. Base Rendering

I’m not going to spend too much time here but I thought I would give some basic settings that I used in V-Ray. Before I rendered, I edited the model to help with the reading. For example, little things like adding slight overhangs at each step to create shadow really helped  to define the step edge and topography of the wharf. I also added lights embedded into the pier by creating a material in Sketchup, painting that material in each location of the light, and then telling that material to emit light in V-Ray. However, running out of time to tweak the lights to my satisfaction, I abandoned the rendered lights and decided to paint in the lights using Photoshop instead.

I used an HDRI for the sky and background seen below which was downloaded from viz-people.com. Along with the HDRI sky and background, I also turned back on the V-Ray sky with an intensity lowered to 0.02 to generate stronger light hitting the surfaces. The biggest advantage of V-Ray over Kerkythea for me is the ambient occlusion settings. This really helps pull out the detail and depth in the base rendering. The AO settings used in this scene were: Amount- 1.0, Subdiv- 16, and Radius- 40.

Other than that, I used the physical camera to control the exposure and set the output resolution to 4500px X 2520px.

Above, the final base rendering from V-Ray.

3. Alpha

The first step in Photoshop often begins with separating out the background from the base file. Most rendering programs will render an alpha channel making the selection of the background much easier. Removing the background allows for better flexibility when adding the sky and background buildings.

4. Background Texture

Next, I searched Google for images of the surrounding context. I then begin sampling the buildings, desaturating the texture, and applied them to the base rendering. I used a range of layer blend modes, but “Multiply” seemed to work the best in most cases. I applied the textures one surface at a time allowing me to match perspectives for each facade.

5. Lights

Knowing that thick fog was going to be added later, I like the idea of the lights in the city bleeding through. I spent a little time painting in light and punching up the lights around the design. I go into greater detail explaining the process of painting in light in my PAINTING LIGHT tutorial .

The design calls for lights imbedded in the deck of the wharf. As mentioned above, I had originally rendered the lights in V-Ray, but didn’t have time to refine the settings. I ended up painting in the light which allows me to hone in the look that I am going for. The process is very similar to adding the lights in windows described above. The important thing here is adding that little bit of glow to each one.

6. Entourage

People are important for understanding scale in a design. Therefore, it is crucial that they are shown at the correct size. I often throw in some 2d people in Sketchup at different locations of the site, then export a 2d graphic of the view, and bring that image into Photoshop. This provides a clear reference for proper scaling when I begin to insert high res images of people. Since the scene has low light, I darkened the people to have more of a silouette effect. This minimizes the destraction of bright colored clothing or improper lighting. It’s also important to note the reflections on the ground. To some, this may be a subtle move, but this helps to “ground” the people and set them into the image. Shadows have the same effect in daytime scenes. Without shadows or reflections, the people will appear to float and seem out of place. Awhile ago, I put together a tutorial on adding people which can be seen HERE.

7. Sky

The more time I spend working on architectural illustrations, the more I realize the importance of the sky. This often will make or break the illustration. In this case, I was looking for something that would work well with a foggy scene but not distract  from the design. I found some images that gave me the flexibility to experiment with the softness of the reading. I ended up desaturating the sky textures and overlaying them on the background which then picked up the blue tones already in the base rendering. I then feathered out the edges so that the sharper texture of the clouds remained in the center of the image drawing attention back to the design.

8. Bring on the Fog

For many people, this part can be intimidating. In reality, there is nothing to it. The most important thing to remember is to slowly layer on the paint. This means setting the brush opacity low, below 10%. Rendering programs like V-Ray can render out a channel called “Z-Depth” which renders a gradient based on how far an object is from the camera. The problem I have with this channel is that it is too perfect. Especially for a foggy scene, the fog is inconsistent in density. I was looking for a loosness and softness that the Z-Depth channel couldn’t provide. I therefore manually painted in the fog. I did two passes shown below. The first pass was to highlight the light coming from behind the city creating a glare look. The second pass represented a denser more encompassing fog. I switched the fog color to red to better explain where it was placed. In this case, the imperfection works to my advantage.  You can see a more in-depth explanation at my “Adding Depth Via Fog” tutorial .

9. Color Overlay

I almost always end with some kind of color overlay. The color overlay does two things. It takes the color range of all the different photoshopped images and brings them together into a more cohesive look. Color overlays also allow me to quickly cool or warm and images changing the entire feel of the illustration in a few seconds. In this case, I was going for an early morning atmosphere, so I looked at several color options. I tested a red overlay at a very low opacity first and then looked at a blue overlay which I ultimately ended up going with. I also really liked the image completely desaturated. The black and white seemed to pull out the texture of the sky and enhance the drama. For more on color overlays, visit THIS POST.

Moving forward, I plan to render out a few more views exploring some different graphical styles not yet addressed on this site. I’m extremely excited about picking apart this design and seeing what kind of new imagery can be extracted. More on this later…

Renderer: V-Ray

Post Processing: Photoshop

Final Output Size: 4500 px x 2520 px

The Boston Long Wharf perspective illustrations are underway. This first illustration is one of the more important ones because it is describing the entire design and its relationship to the water and the city. An early morning fog scene has been on my to-do-list for a while and this view/project seemed like a perfect opportunity to give it a try. One of the toughest things I found working on an illustration like this was keeping the overall color saturation to a minimum. I have a tendency to amp up the color in past illustrations through lots of color overlays. With this image, I constantly was going back and desaturating layers to maintain that early morning mood.

This illustration took me a little longer than the others for a few reasons. I have been designing and building the 3D model as I go. Typically, I spend a few hours when I can after work during the week on the modeling. It got to the point on Friday where I had to buckle down and make some design decisions and stick with them for the final illustrations. The good thing was once these decisions were made, I was able to quickly brute force model and get things where I needed them to start setting up the rendering.

I have attached some of the screen shots of the Sketchup model below.

The other thing that absorbed some of my time was setting up the file to render. Anyone that follows this site knows I prefer to spend most of my time in Photoshop. However, with this shot, I decided to invest a little more time preparing the textures and lighting. V-Ray was used for this image instead of Kerkythea, a rare occurrence on this blog. Below are some screen shots of the raw rendering output from V-Ray.

I kept most of the surrounding context largely untextured. This area of Boston is highly photographed online and I knew I would be overlaying images of the background buildings on top of the base rendering. For that reason, I rendered the context gray allowing me to overlay the photography but still maintain the light and shadow of the base rendering.

You may have noticed the title says, “Part 1”. I plan to salvage what I can of this 4th of July weekend and pick back up in the next post with an in-depth break down of the post processing in Photoshop. These types of illustrations are fun to work on and I think the workflow would be interesting to see.

In the previous wharf post, I discussed black and white texture studies that focused on pattern and ground plane elements throughout the wharf. The above image builds off of those studies introducing color and material. Site plans are extremely useful in the design process and I wanted this one to be somewhat malleable as I tweak things.

The wharf is on a strong axis with Boston’s Old State House. I wanted to be able to study this connection as well as the wharf’s relationship to the dense city fabric. The site plan was therefore setup to include this information which meant creating one of the highest resolution images I have ever done. The above image tops out at 10,000 pixels tall. Typical illustrations for me are around 4,000 to 5,000 pixels on the longest edge. The high resolution was needed to be able to study different spaces and textures up close. However, this will also allow me to crop out several close-up images for presentations allowing me to get lots of mileage out of this one site plan.

To manage the high resolution, I rendered out two 5000×2300 images seen below. To speed things up, I didn’t worry about adding texture or material in the Kerkythea rendering. I knew I would be experimenting with textures in PS and didn’t want to have to worry about baked in materials. I only needed the shade and shadow so I rendered some clay models and stitched them together in Photoshop.

The final PSD file can be broken down into three main sections. I used an aerial image to get much of the existing texture information of the roads, buildings, etc. The aerial was overlayed on top of the clay model with a lowered opacity. I then took the black and white texture studies from the previous post and worked that information into the new site plan. Since all of the line work elements were separated and grouped in the previous PSD file, it was easy to make adjustments and extend the ground plane elements to the Old State House. Finally, I added texture, color, and vegetation on top of everything.

With the site plan far along, I’m ready to start diving into some perspectives. I hope to get going with those in the upcoming posts along with some portfolio spreads. I’m thinking about setting up a vertically oriented portfolio layout as this is a more common layout with the online printers. More to come on this later.