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

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

I was trying to think of a different way to break down this image rather than showing a slow buildup of layers in Photoshop like I normally do. What I came up with was to show some side-by-side comparisons between the raw base rendering and the fully Photoshopped final image. I think this method helps reveal all of the nuanced adjustments that happen throughout the illustration. I also tried to extract some of the 2D assets that I used so that you can see how I reworked the lighting and tones of these assets or how I overlaid them to add age and texture to the base rendering.

1. Left Side Closeup

With each new image that I create, I find myself spending more time thinking about and exploring how to blend the 2D with the 3D to the point that the two are indistinguishable. It has become a borderline obsession for me. The more that I do this, the more I realize that it is less about over-the-top complicated moves in Photoshop but instead more about implementing really simple moves that nudge the tone or lighting to where it needs to be. I’m constantly studying light and tone in the real world which then allows me to better estimate what needs to be done with 2D or 3D elements to better blend the two.

In the above image, there are a lot of really subtle things happening in Photoshop that add up to a much more dramatic final result. I overlaid a ground texture to breakup the plaza. I added a ledge texture in Photoshop to create the appearance of more weathering and age to the seat wall in the foreground. Similarly, textures were added to age the buildings in the background. For the vegetation, I really just used a careful layering system to create moments of highlight and shadow. From there, it was all about reworking the toning so that all of these different cutout elements read holistically as one.

2. Right Side Closeup

The first thing you may notice with the right side is just how dark certain areas had become to the point that all of the detail was lost. Though this bothered me in the past, it doesn’t much anymore. I tend to worry more about the highlights getting too blown out rather than the shadows getting too dark. The dark shadows help to soften an image when there are a lot of textures going as well as add drama to the highlights of the scene.

3. Center Closeup

Again, I used some textures to breakup the paved plaza. I pulled textures from photographs of the La Grande Voile sculpture to more accurately represent the age and sheen of the steel. I wanted the metal on the new student hub volumes to relate to the sculpture which meant lots of toning and extracting of texture. The whole point of the illustration was to show the relationship of the architecture to the iconic sculptures and buildings surrounding the site and how a well placed pedestrian street could connect these elements. Most of the people were placed in the center of the image to keep the focus there. However, I let them move in and out of the light and shadow to create clear focal points and push elements forward and back.

4. Sky

I actually had a little breakthrough moment when I was working on the sky for this image. It seems whenever I find the “right” sky for an illustration, the quality is terrible. I can sometime run a denoiser filter to smooth it out, but it still lacks detail. In this case, the sky I wanted to use was really poor quality. But I had spent too much time looking for the right cloud formation and was coming up empty so I had to make this one work. The first step was to tone the colors to match the lighting of the scene. I then ran a denoiser (I use a denoiser by Topaz). However, at this point, the clouds still lacked detail. This is where the breakthrough came in. I grabbed the smudge too, set the strength to 90, and used a soft round tip. I then started smudging the edges of the cloud through a series of small quick movements to get back the crisp edge. I was surprised at how natural it looked considering how simple the move was. I spent all of 10 minutes and the image looked like it was at a much higher resolution. I know I am probably not explaining this well, but perhaps I will do some quick tutorial about it in the future.

Final Image

I just about posted this image as a black and white because I almost think it is more successful as a black and white. But given how much time I spent playing with the colors and toning everything, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

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