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.

1. Base Renderings

To get started, I rendered out several different versions of my model in V-Ray with different layers turned off and on. I had no idea where I wanted to take this so I wanted to make sure I had lots of different options ready so that I could iterate quickly. In the end, I only used two of the versions of the base files layered on top of each other in Photoshop. I am also showing the Material ID elements that V-Ray kicked out. These are extremely important for an image like this because of all of the selections that I will be making in Photoshop.

2. Line Work

Next, I did the same thing with line work as I did with the V-Ray base files. I exported several different versions out of Sketchup by turning off and on groups in the model. In this case, I wanted the line work separated out from each other so I could explore color and opacity on an individual basis.

3. Color and Texture

Once the base files and line work were setup in Photoshop, I began layering in color and texture. This was done by setting up a group in Photoshop for each color and then applying a layer mask to each group for each zone the color was for. While this took some time up front, it really allowed me to iterate quickly and test out lots of color combinations and textures for each zone. By setting up a group for each zone with its own unique mask, any color or texture placed in a group would take on that masked shape. This avoided lots of duplicate masks and kept things organized and highly editable.

4. Additional Detail

Finally, I added in some final details that brought in some extra texture and complexity. You will notice lots of little smudges which helped to rough up the line work and break up the smoothness of the background.

5. Color Grading

I shifted the background colors away from neutral grays to a cooler temperature. I also punched up the contrast and darkened the shadows just a hint. Below is the corresponding section I put together alongside the perspective.

1. 3D Model

For an image like this, trying to mask so many people around desks would have been a nightmare. On top of that, the lighting for the space is directly overhead, so finding enough cutout people with the proper lighting would have been equally difficult. Therefore, I used mostly 3D people for this scene. At Design Distill, we use 3d people all of the time in the images we make because of the fact that they perfectly pick up the lighting of the scene and the time that it saves not masking in Photoshop. The 3d people do not always look great up close, but are perfect for situations like this where they are seen from a distance.

If I had a little more time, I would have liked to add in more details on the desk surfaces and add a few floating lounge spaces in the areas of the floors that are still a little bare. There is simply an endless amount of detail and little narratives that could go into a view like this but the weekend was coming to an end so I had to call it.

2. Sky

If the sky feels a little unnatural, that was intentional. Working on so many illustrations each week, sometimes I just want to switch it up and go with something a little different. I wanted a punch of color, so I took a sky image that had lots of blues and purples, and dumped a whole lot of orange on top. In the original sky image, the clouds contained lots of contrast and drama, so I muted them a bit so that the sky didn’t feel too busy. I wanted the color to be the focal point, not the cloud texture.

3. Darken

Once the sky was dropped in, I turned my attention back to the architecture. I darkened the exterior columns and rooftop significantly so only a hint of texture and detail was left. this was done by setting up a mask that excluded the interior and adjusting the levels. I didn’t want the exterior textures competing too much with the interior details as this would muddy the hierarchy and flow of the image. I wanted the eye to move past the exterior elements and go directly to the lit spaces inside.

4. Interior Details

Much of the detail added in Photoshop was subtle. Overall, moments of warmth or coolness was added to break up the monotony of each floor stretching from one side of the image to the other. I punched up the light around the conference spaces and added in some green walls to further visually break up the spaces. A few 2D people were added along with some desk lamps and accent lighting. Finally, a subtle horizon reflection was added to the glass to help define the glass plane.

5. Vegetation

The roof vegetation went relatively quick. The vegetation was not the focal point of the image and was significantly darkened which meant I could be a little more fast and loose with textures and it wouldn’t be noticeable. The most important part was getting the edge shadows to read properly so that the grass felt tall and had depth.

6. Final Image

I didn’t do much with the color grading. I softened the shadows a small amount and punched up the sky with more saturation. I rendered this image at 9,000 pixels wide which allowed me to really focus in on the detail and make crisp selections. I am just about to the point where all of my new images on this website will be around the 10k pixel size. I was initially worried about working with such large images sizes but I really haven’t noticed a difference in performance in Photoshop. While renderings take longer (I am still rendering all of these on my single desktop), they benefits of the higher resolution far outweigh the added time for rendering in my opinion.

1. Toning the Grass

I am first showing the the grass before it was darkened. The grass is made up of four or five different textures and toned to have a similar desaturated grayish green. Once I had the textures stitched together, I needed to darken the grass significantly. I did this in two steps. First, I adjusted the levels to punch up the contrast and to deepen the shadows. In some cases, the darker parts of the grass started to lose some of the detail in the shadows.

Next, I wanted to evenly darken the grass while giving it a subtle blue tint. My favorite way to do this is by creating a new layer, painting it a dark blue, and setting the Layer Blend Mode to “Multiply”.

2. Additional Details

I added in lots of trees and a stream cutting across the image. In both cases, they are either shifting really dark or really light continuing the extreme contrast. For the water, I setup a mask and simply flipped the sky so that the water reflected the exact same tones.

3. Final Adjustments

Now that I have the base image where I want it, I can begin setting up the final color adjustments. Up until this point, the toning was happening on an elemental basis meaning I was toning the trees, grass, building, and sky separately. These next round of adjustments will be happening at the top of the layer stack and effecting the entire image.
I first wanted to lightly wash the image and push the pure black shadows to something a little more blue in tone. I did this by creating a layer, painting it a dark blue, and setting the Layer Blend Mode to “Screen”. I then tweaked the opacity of the layer to reduce the strength of the effect.

Next, I copied that same blue layer, but this time, set the Layer Blend Mode to “Lighten”. The change is subtle and both “Screen” and “Lighten” are softening the shadows of the image. The difference is “Lighten” effects only the darkest parts of the image whereas “Screen” is effecting both the dark and light parts of the image.

I wanted to move away from the grass feeling too green, so I next adjusted the “Color Balance”. With the “Color Balance” dialogue box open, I first selected the “Highlights” in the “Tone” drop-down menu. I pushed the highlights of the image to a cooler blue tone by moving the “Cyan” slider to the left. I then chose the “Shadows” in the “Tone” drop-down menu. With the shadows, I didn’t want to lose all of the warmth, so I stayed in the purple ranges by pushing the “Cyan” and “Yellow” sliders to the right. I should point out this took some testing and experimenting before arriving at to these final settings.

Finally, the transition from the hill to the sky was a little to harsh, so I painted in some haze that focused on the horizon, and softly washing the entire image.

Final Image

1 Base Rendering

Most of my base renderings look bad starting out, but this one looks exceptionally horrible. Getting started on this image, I saw this base rendering and this was one of the moments that I just about backed out of this image haha.

2 Prairie Grass

A lot of time was spend finding good high quality textures through Google image searches. These are just some of the ones that I used.

As I mentioned above, I combined many different textures to build in a diversity of color tones and densities throughout the site while maintaining sharpness and detail up close. There was quite a bit of time spent rotating and skewing the textures so that they had the feeling of going up and down hills. You may notice that towards the end, you start to see a lot of repeat textures, however, this gets broken up and lost in some of the following steps as I add in paths and trees.

3 Paths

One of the reasons for this image was to think through the flow of the landscape and test out some paths systems. I started out simply roughing in the paths with solid paint. Once I had their locations determined, I cleaned up the geometry and turned them into a mask so that I could quickly place in a manicured grass texture.

With the paths in place, I then added slight shadows to give them depth and help define them from the wild grasses.

4 Prairie Flow

Up until this point, the prairie grass was still feeling too wild and even. I wanted to set up some moments where the site was a little more designed and where groupings of the same plant created light and dark patches. Since the paths were in place, I used them as a framework from which the dark and light garden patches flowed around.

5 Subtle Shadow and Light

The image was still too flat at this point, so I faked in some subtle light and shadow to help clarify the hills and topography.

6 Details

With the grasses in place, I could start to add in the details. The trees were important to emphasizing the idea of the landscape flowing around and over the project. Again, since the paths were in place, I used them as a framework to help place the trees. I also added lots of people which at this point, was just another way to build in a little more texture.

7 Final Effects

I dropped in some diffuse cloud shadows so that there were moments of strong highlight that pulled the eye from one spot to another around the image. I was also a little bored of the image up to this point and wanted to amp up the drama.

Finally, I softened the shadows, pulled back some of the warmth, and tried to grab back some of the detail lost in the dark parts of the image.