Uncategorized | Visualizing Architecture

Summerfest Pavilion Color Studies

Alex Hogrefe — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 00:28:02 +0000

It has been a while since my last post, the longest amount of time I have ever taken away from this website actually. As much as I love illustrating architecture, I love doing other things too and sometimes there isn’t enough time to do both. Besides working digitally, I spend quite a bit of time building and doing carpentry work on my house. I use to work in the wood shop when I was at grad school at Miami University and I have carried over those skills into revitalizing our historic 1920’s Dutch colonial house. Anyways, it was getting to the point where the time spent working on the computer vs working with my hands and doing physical work was getting a little too out of balance.

With that said, I still thought a lot about the Summerfest Pavilion and the images I was creating. As soon as I got back into things, I started to rework the design…..again. I can’t seem to get to a place where I am satisfied with how the architecture is articulated. The overall roof form has not changed but how it meets the ground has. The building was feeling too solid so I removed some walls and added columns.

The two images in this post below perhaps represent a more aggressive approach that I am taking on things such as color grading. I played around with increased color saturation, slightly unnatural toning, highly textured sky’s, etc. The illustrations took on a sort of vintage vibe but I like the look and plan to continue exploring some of these ideas in future images. Below is a super quick break down.

Sketchup and Vray

Sketchup Model Screenshot

V-Ray Base Rendering

The first thing you may notice is the 3D people. I rarely use 3D people because of how unnatural they can sometime feel in images. However, they are all distant from the camera and I ended up giving them a little blur so the “3Dness” isn’t felt as much and this saved me a lot of time in Photoshop. All of the 3D people came from V-Ray Cosmos.

Textures

Image after textures applied in Photoshop

Most of my time went into refining the concrete textures and building a nice sky. I was struggling to setup a good concrete texture in 3D that had the look I was going for so I focused my efforts in Photoshop. I tested out many different styles of concrete before arriving to the look above. I probably combined four or five different concrete textures in Photoshop as well as add the dirt leaks on all of the edges. I am more interested in illustrating how the architecture will look in 20 or 40 years vs how it looks right after construction.

Clouds

Cloud Cleanup in Photoshop

I talked a few posts back about a technique I have been using to cleanup cloud images. Here is another example of a cloud image that had the right look for my illustration, but contained all sorts of artifacts and noise and was very low quality. I ran some denoiser filters on it and then rebuilt the edge using the smudge tool. It is not perfect but miles better than the original image.

Color Grading

Color Grading Before and After

This is where I started to get a little experimental. Normally, I prefer a much lighter sky but decided to keep this one dark and very saturated. The greens shifted to oranges and browns and the blues shifted more towards cyan. I also amplified the detail of the concrete textures and vegetation.

Saturation

Warmth and Saturation Before and After

I added several warm color overlays which helped pop the highlights. Finally, the color saturating was bumped up in the sky and over the foreground vegetation areas.

Final Images

KRob 2021

Alex Hogrefe — Wed, 19 May 2021 23:51:48 +0000

The 47th Krob Competition has put out a call for entries. Categories include Digital/Hybrid Media, Hand Delineation, Physical Delineation, Travel Sketch, and Animation. The 47th Ken Roberts Memorial Competition (KRob) is the longest-running architectural drawing competition in the world.

Students and professionals may submit entries in a number of categories including Digital/Hybrid Media, Physical Delineation, Hand Delineation, Travel Sketch, and Animation category.

All entries must be received by Friday, July 9th, 2021 by 11:59 pm CDT

Visit www.KROBARCH.com for more information.

Below are some of the winners from last year:

WINNER – The HKS Award for Best Hand Delineation
Roland Escalona
Danielian Associates
Professional Hand

WINNER – Juror Citation
Trent Loomis
Oklahoma State University
Student Digital/Mixed

WINNER – Best in Category
Gary Chung
TOY Manufactory
Professional Digital/Mixed

WINNER – The HKS Award for Best Hand Delineation
Manuel Zermeno
Princeton University
Student Hand

WINNER – Best in Category
Georgine Botha
Cornell University
Student Digital/Mixed

WINNER – Juror Citation
Christy Au
University of Michigan
Student Digital/Mixed

Finalist
John Humphries ASAI, IDEC
Miami University
Professional Hand

Finalist
Matthew Poon, RIBA Part II
UCL Bartlett School of Architecture
Student Hand

Finalist
Nicholas Warnet
University of Michigan TCAUP
Professional Hand

KRob Competition

Alex Hogrefe — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 23:29:43 +0000

The 46th Krob Competition has put out a call for entries. Categories include Digital/Hybrid Media, Hand Delineation, Physical Delineation, Travel Sketch, and Animation. Anybody who reads this blog knows how much of a fan I am of the unique architectural images and styles that come out of this competition. The winning work always provides a boost of inspiration and pushes me to think about my own work through a different more exploratory lens

Most importantly, all entries must be received by October 22nd, 2020 at 5:00 pm CST. To get more information or view all of the past winners, visit http://www.krobarch.com

Porter Sq. Interior

Alex Hogrefe — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 23:55:45 +0000

I am revisiting the Porter Square Station project because there was one more very important image that I needed to develop to finish telling this project’s story. It was an image that I had started several times but kept abandoning. The problem was that the space was complex with lots of unresolved detailing. I looked at so many views and tested out so many designs for this one but nothing was clicking early on. Finally last week, some ideas popped in my head that turned into a possible view that finally led to the image below.

Sketchup Model

There are three main elements to this image that I was trying to portray: The ticket gates/entry portal leading down to the Red Line platform on the left, the “forest” of columns that visitors can meander through to access the commuter rail platform, and finally the floating commuter rail that places the train on display via large expanses of glass towards the top of the image.

V-Ray Base Rendering

I wanted this space to be red. It turns out it is somewhat difficult to work with this much red. Light areas kept getting blown out and I was struggling to find the right balance of saturation. Too much red saturation and detail gets lost. To little red saturation and the images quickly feels grey and faded.

Final Image

I spent some time trying to separate geometry with light and build some depth in the image. Again, because of all of the geometry going on in this view, I wanted to avoid the space feeling too cluttered and confusing. I used the light to help define edges and push elements back and forth in the image in an attempt to help organize and clarify the composition.

Since it has been a while, below is the entire series of images for this project thus far.

Texas Prairie: Color Grading

Alex Hogrefe — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 01:04:50 +0000

I don’t often discuss in detail how I tone images because the process ranges so much from image to image. Daytime images use different techniques compared to overcast images or dusky images. On top of that, sometimes I am in the mood to really experiment with color grading while other times I keep things subtle. However, a trend I have been noticing with my work is that my techniques for toning and creating atmospheric effects are becoming less and less complicated. It used to be adjustment layers on top of adjustment layers with many additional layers of fog and Topaz filters. The simplification of my technique is in part because I am realizing that the underlying image prior to toning needs to be setup in such a way to properly accept the toning. For example, in this image, I had to really darken parts of the illustration so that the color grading on top would read properly.
For this latest image, I had an idea in my head of where I wanted it to end up, which meant taking things darker than I normally do. I was going for really deep contrast that silhouetted the building and ground plane against the sky, interior lights, and meandering stream. The final color grading really shifted the tones of the image at the end, but each step was subtle and built off of one another to get the big effect at the end. Below is a break down of this process.

1. Toning the Grass

Prairie Grass Before Darkening

Prairie Grass Levels Adjustment

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.

Solid Blue Layer

Solid Blue Layer Set to “Multiply” Over Prairie Grass

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

Addition of Trees and Stream

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

Solid Blue Layer

Solid Blue Layer Set to “Screen”

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.

Solid Blue Layer

Solid Blue Layer Set to “Lighten”

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.

Color Balance Adjustments

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.

Haze Layer Isolated

Image with Haze Applied

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

Texas Prairie Aerial

Alex Hogrefe — Thu, 21 May 2020 00:57:57 +0000

This was one of my more ambitious undertakings and an image I almost didn’t do. I had a lot of things going against me that made me second guess taking on this type of image. It was going to require a ton of Photoshop, the view is at an angle that tends to feel flat and boring, and there was going to be a lot of pain staking detail. However, I felt that if I could dial in the textures just right, it could tell an interesting story. The main focus of the project design was this idea of a complex and lush landscape that flowed over the project and I needed a view like this, closeup, to drive that idea home. This view angle lands somewhere in between a site plan and full on aerial perspective. It needed to have some perspective to it, but cut out much of the context so that focus remained on the project itself.
The problem with a view angle like this is that it doesn’t show the horizon, so I cannot lean on a dramatic sky or atmospheric depth to make the image more interesting. Instead it is all about the prairie grass and vegetation textures. This view also makes reading the topography somewhat problematic because the camera is looking extremely downward onto the site. This meant that I had to create a sense of topography by carefully rotating and positioning the grass textures so that they felt like they were going up and down hills.
However, the most challenging aspect of an image like this is getting the prairie grass to read properly at different scales. I was struggling to find textures that looked good from both a distance and up close when zoomed in. To overcome this, I layered many different field textures together so that there was a diversity to the grass at the different scales while remaining crisp when close up.
Below is a quick break down with a focus on the prairie grass build up. I rendered the image out at 10,000 pixels wide so that I could get the sharpness in grass textures that I was looking for. My Photoshop file ended up with over 1,300 layers. An image like this is never done, and there are many other things I would like to refine or add detail too, but I need to call it quits and move on to some other perspectives that I have in mind.

1 Base Rendering

V-Ray 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

Textures

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

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.

Path Shadows

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

Garden Patches Isolated

Garden Patches Inserted into Image

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

Light and Shadow Isolated

Light and Shadow Inserted into Image

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

Details Isolated

Details Inserted into Image

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

Cloud Shadows

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.

Final Image

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.

Final Image Crop 01

Final Image Crop 02

Final Image Crop 03