BRUSHED STAINLESS STEEL (TUTORIAL)

Every so often, there comes a time when I need to illustrate a brushed stainless steel finish like the column in the above image. In my experience, adjusting the "shininess" settings in any rendering program to get that brushed look dramatically increases the rendering time. On top of that, it can take multiple test renderings to get the style I am hoping for. So... I created a work around. The process is simple, but powerful. The basic workflow involves rendering the material as a simple mirror reflection. Rendering as a mirror reflection adds almost no time to the total render time unlike adjusting the "shininess" settings. Once in Photoshop, I apply a motion blur and Gaussian blur to give it that soft, brushed stainless steel look. 

Most rendering software can create reflective surfaces easily. For those of you who use Kerkythea, I have added some quick steps to show you how it's done.

1) In Kerkythea, select the material you want to have the brushed finish. In the left panel, a star will highlight the material selected. Right-click on that material and choose "Edit Material".

2) Once in the "Material Editor" dialogue box, right-click on the work "Reflection" and choose the "Add Color" icon.

3) In the "Select Color" dialogue box, choose a white color. Then choose "Accept".

PHOTOSHOP POST PROCESSING:

4) With the materials setup, render the geometry and open the rendering in Photoshop. Once in Photoshop, choose the "Polygonal Lasso Tool" and select the mirror reflection items to be softened. Once selected, right-click inside of the selection and choose "Layer via Copy".

5) I now want to reselect this new layer so that when I blur the layer, it will maintain crisp edges. To do this, choose the "Magic Wand Tool", and select the area around the new layer. Next, choose "Select>Inverse" to flip the selection to the metal material in the new layer. 

6) At the top, choose "Filter>Blur>Motion Blur".

7) With the "Motion Blur" dialogue box open, go to the box marked "Angle". Since the column is a vertical element, I want the blur to move vertically as well. Therefore, I am setting the angle to 90 degrees. The distance will vary from illustration to illustration. It seemed like 200 pixels worked best for this image.

8) The vertical streaks are still too sharp. With the column still selected, I am going to give it a Gaussian Blur. Go to "Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur" to open the dialogue box.

9) In "Gaussian Blur" dialogue box, adjust the radius to soften the metal reflection. It's easy to overdo it in this step so make sure you don't lose the definition of the light and dark areas of the reflection.

10) As a final step, sometimes it is necessary to duplicate the brushed metal layer to get more definition around the edges since blurring may cause the edges to be somewhat transparent. 

I use this technique all the time and the results almost always come out great. Although it may seem complicated at first, in reality, it is a very simple workflow. I just went into great depth in each step in hopes of answering most questions that may come up.

Above: The column before the Photoshop softening technique.

Above: The column after the Photoshop softening technique.

SAVANNAH TRIP PICS: HDR

Thought I would post some pics I took while in Savannah GA. I figured now would be a good time to work on my HDR workflow. Some of the pics were shot with a DSLR, but most most were with a point and shoot. 

DAY VS. NIGHT

I'm getting ready to head to Savannah, GA (flying out tonight actually) for a week, which doesn't leave much time for this latest post. I spent this afternoon creating a night scene illustration using a really simple Kerkythea base image. At first, the goal was to make the illustration look like a graphite drawing like the images in this post a few months back. However, I quickly became board of that and started adding color. The original Kerkythea night rendering was lacking definition in some areas, so I rendered a daytime view to combine with the night rendering. Once I did this and dropped it into Photoshop, I turned off the night rendering layer and noticed the daytime image with all of the grunge textures applied to it didn't look half bad, hence why I posted both a daytime and nighttime rendering. With that said, I'm off to sandy beaches and beautiful Savannah architecture. See everyone in a week!

Above, line work exported from Sketchup.

Above, Kerkythea clay rendering. Tutorial HERE

Above, Kerkythea night rendering. Tutorial HERE

ABSTRACT ILLUSTRATIONS: PART 2

Every once and a while, there comes a time to produce an illustration that is a little more abstract in style. Such cases in the past included situations where the design wasn't developed to the point that a full blown rendering could be produced, or where I really needed to grab the viewers attention such as with lecture series posters or website graphics. I find abstract illustrations to be the most intriguing and fun to work on because essentially anything goes. I can be more creative with the color pallets and not be so precise with the Photoshop work. I came across some paintings by Paul Davies that really had a beautiful quality and texture to them (would love to have one of his works hanging in my apartment). The guy uses amazing color combinations and the compositions of his paintings are spot on. I wanted to see if I could achieve a similar "attitude" by simply using shadows from a Sketchup model and a little Photoshop wizardry. While I'm not trying to fake my illustration to look like a painting, I find myself on this quest to experiment with representing the subtle nuances that paintings like Davies' have and that computer renderings will never have.  Some sort of hybrid that is on the fringe of both hand made and computer generated.

Above: Sketchup shadows export. In this case, the shadows were the only thing I needed from the 3d model. everything else would be done in Photoshop

The background is the most important part of this illustration. The tree silhouette is comprised of four images of cypress trees I found in a google search. I adjusted the level of the images as well as used the burn and dodge tool to get the silhouette look. I then mirrored the trees for the reflection.

Once the overall layout was setup, I experimented different color combos until I found what I was looking for.

The final step involved adding textures, lots of textures. I let different textures overlap one another and really played them up in some areas, while not as much in other areas. I also spent some time with the smudge tool getting rid of perfectly straight lines and roughing up random areas of the image. I could have spent the whole day on this image. It's one of those things that are never finished. Expect to see more posts on this topic later on down the road. 

JUST PLAYING AROUND: CONTINUED

I spend a lot of my time going onto Google Earth/Bing maps studying sites and grabbing screen shots. However, I find these sources equally useful for textures and finding site plan elements. For example, in my last post, I uploaded an image of a site plan through which I was experimenting with different styles and looks. I needed some trees and grass textures for part of the image. I noticed a nearby golf course in Google Earth had exactly what I was looking for.

These images of the trees worked particularly well for my needs because the grass around the trees was much lighter than the trees and shadows making it much easier to extract the elements from the background.

With the "Dodge" tool, I set the range to "Highlights" and began lightening the grass even more so that I was left with just the detail of the trees and shadows. 

With the "Polygonal" tool, I roughly windowed the trees and dragged them into my site plan Photoshop file. To remove the white part of the cutout trees, I set the layer blend mode to "Multiply". Using this blend mode removes the light areas of the layer and keeps the darkest sections of the layer, hence why I lightened the grass to almost white.

Using this method saves a lot of time and looks better compared to trying to selectively cut out around the trees and shadows using the eraser tool or magic wand tool.

PHOTOSHOP LAYERS: Below, I have also uploaded the different layers I used to compile the final look of the site plan. I will try to add links to the different areas of this site showing how I achieved each layer.

1. Above, the first layer is simply an exported image of my Sketchup model with the face style set to both "Hidden Line" and "X-Ray". I also have "Guides" turned on. Steps explaining how to add and turn on guides can be see in my 3D BLUEPRINT tutorial.

2. Next I created a clay rendering of the Sketchup model to get the shadow information. To set up and render a clay model, check out my CLAY MODEL RENDERING tutorial.

3. The shadows in the rendering are still reading a little flat, so I also rendered a second clay model that will act as an "ambient occlusion" layer. I have two ways that allow you to get this effect. The first is the faster route and uses Kerkythea. I explain how to do this at about the 1:46 mark of the SOFT SHADOWS VIDEO tutorial.  This step can also be accomplished manually if you are more comfortable in Photoshop rather than using a rendering engine. Visit my AMBIENT OCCLUSION tutorial to see how to manually create this layer in Photoshop.

4. I also used an exported image of my Sketchup model with the face style set to "Shaded with Textures" to give some basic color info as well as allow me to more easily locate the sidewalks and other architectural elements.

5. Finally, I compiled the above layers together along with some grunge textures and Google Earth elements mentioned earlier in this post. Some of you may ask why so many layers? Many of these layers could have been combined together such as rendering the Kerkythea clay model with textures turned on, or combining the x-ray and color Sketchup exported images. The reason why I keep these separate is so that I can adjust the opacity/blend modes individually of each layer allowing for more flexibility towards reaching the best final look. Every rendering I do is slightly different than the others and thus requires different adjustments accordingly. Plus, setting up the many different layers allows for more experimentation when looking for that unique look.

JUST PLAYING AROUND

This image is taking a bunch of the different tutorials and posts on this website and mixing them together. Notice the lawn mower stripes in the grass haha. It's all about the details.

 

PAST PRESENTATION BOARDS: PART 3

This post is continuing off of the 4 boards discussed last week. To get up to speed on what I have already done so far, read this first. For the most part, I kept the overall layout of the original presentation, however, I have been tweaking certain elements and making adjustments in attempt to get the compositions to read clearer.

ARCHITECTURE PRESENTATION BOARD 3- RENDERINGS: The original rendering board had way too much information. I felt the layout worked, but there was some useless information that could be removed.

1. Imagery: Similar to board 1, the imagery on board 3 is too desaturated. At the time, I thought I was making the building stand out by desaturating the landscape. Over the years, however, I have spent less time trying to get my designs to stand out and more time playing up the site around the buildings in an effort to create a better relationship between the two.

2. Physical Model: There really isn't any reason to have images of the physical model that I built for the project on the presentation boards. I thought that including these images would give me brownie points for the competition. In reality, they are not adding any value to the story that I want these boards to tell.

 

 With the new rendering board, the first thing that I focused on was adding color and life back into the illustrations. A lot of time was spent just adding color overlays and textures to the existing illustrations. I also focused on simplifying the boards. The main image now has lots of room to breath, while the four vignettes at the bottom are larger and have more of a presence in the board instead of just floating in space. There is an important detail of how the new museum design connects to the original Saarinen building, and I wanted to play this up. I therefore separated it from the other vignettes and again related its location to the elevations.  

ARCHITECTURE PRESENTATION BOARD 4- DIAGRAMS: Not much changed with this board. I felt the layout worked well. The only thing that I thought needed adjusting was the size of the building roof plan illustration. I felt it competed too much with the board 1 site plan. As with the other boards, the illustrations at the bottom are too desaturated and for some reason I faded them out haha. 

  As you can see, the two are relatively similar. I shifted some things around so that the grid of the new board would relate to the grids of the other new boards. I also added some tone and textures to some of the illustrations.

THE FINAL COMPOSITION: With just some simple color corrections and minor compositional moves, I was able to make some dramatic changes to the feel of the competition boards. The original structure of the boards is still there, but this time I erred on the side of simplicity and clarity vs. quantity of information.

 

PAST PRESENTATION BOARDS: PART 2

My last post discussed some architectural presentation boards that were, for the most part, poorly organized. I wanted to go into this week's post discussing some presentation boards that were almost up to par, but just needed some tweaking. I also noticed some comments asking me to revisit the boards, editing them based on my critiques which I thought was a good idea and therefore tried to do in this post.

To begin, this group of presentation boards was created in my final year of undergraduate school for a competition held by the Cranbrook Academy in 2007. The competition asked for four 20”x20” boards. For the amount of work that went into this project, cramming so much information into four boards turned out to be more difficult than I anticipated. On top of that, I have always found it challenging to organize graphics on a square format. The four boards were designed to read well by themselves, but also relate to one another when placed side-by-side. This was done by setting up a simple grid and creating relationships from board to board such as using the same size windows or overlapping background elements.

     

ARCHITECTURAL PRESENTATION BOARD 1- INTRO BOARD: The first board that I revisited was the top left layout with the large illustrated site plan. There are a couple of things that jump out at me right away.

1. First, the diagrams on the left feel like they are out of place and don't belong on the page. They seem like they were stuck there because I didn't know where else to put them. There are probably a few tricks I could do to set them better into the page, however, I feel that they just don't belong. 

2. The main background image is too cold. I was in a phase back in the day where I avoided color at all costs. You can see this in my undergraduate portfolio where the whole thing is black and white. The problem with the mostly desaturated site plan is that it comes off as lifeless. While at the time, I saw it as being artistic, in reality, it's not projecting the design in a positive light.

3. The text gets lost in the background. I remember doing this because I was afraid of the text distracting too much from the large site plan image. But, because I faded it out and threw it on top of a busy part of the site plan, the text becomes very difficult to read and almost becomes more distracting to the overall composition.

 

Above: The original board                           Above: The new board

What I did to solve the issues mentioned above was to simplify things. Typically with the intro boards, I like them to be simple but powerful. The site plan I felt, could be a powerful image if tweaked. I pulled back the destaturation a little, and added a green overlay. This took all but 10 minutes but really made a big difference. I also moved the diagrams off of this page and onto a different board. This cleared up some space to move the text around. I darkened the black transparent box to help separate the text from the background, so that the two didn't compete. I also placed a scanned sketch just below the text as a way to end the paragraph.

ARCHITECTURAL PRESENTATION BOARD 2- DIAGRAMS & PLANS: I think this second original board has a decent layout. There is a lot of information on this layout, but much of it is difficult to read.

1. The floor plans are hard to understand. This was a tricky part of the layout because the floor plans themselves are an odd shape. Therefore, I had to fit them on the page the best I could without making them too small. There is also so much line work that it is hard to decipher what is inside, what is outside, what are ramps, what are corridors, etc.

2. Along with the floor plans, the section at the bottom is next to impossible to understand at a quick glance. Understanding the section is key to understanding the design of this project, therefore, the section must read better than it currently does.

3. The sketches on the left don't belong on this page. It's always important to integrate process work, but finding a place to include it can be challenging.

 

Above: The original board                          Above: The new board

The first thing you may notice is that the diagrams from the first board were switched with the sketches on the second board. This tells a more organized story of the project. Next, I faintly shaded the floor plans. As subtle of a move as this is, it makes a big difference on how fast one can read and understand the floor plans. Now, items such as inside vs. outside, openings in the floor, vertical circulation, etc. can be understood at a glance. Finally, I revisited the sections, and applied a technique popular on this site to add depth and clarity to the line work. While I like the simplicity of just the line work, adding a little shading goes a long way.

Be sure to check back next week. I will revisit the last two boards and discuss how to unclutter a overly busy layout as seen in the third rendering board.

PAST PRESENTATION BOARDS: FAIL

Presentation boards are something I haven’t really talked about on this site and they seem like a good thing to transition into. I was looking through some of my old boards and couldn’t stop noticing really stupid mistakes that I kept making.

The below presentation was created in 2006, my junior year in undergrad. The design was an urban planning project and we were presenting our massing studies of an area in downtown Toledo, OH. At the time, I had only been using Photoshop for about a year, and this was probably the 3^rd project that I had used Photoshop to create my boards with instead of drawing them by hand. With that said, I will use these boards to begin explaining what not to do.

BOARD 1: The first thing that really grinds my gears is that there are hardly any labels or explanations. For some reason, I felt it wasn’t necessary to write much. This is crucial because you won’t always be standing next to your boards to defend the design. Having short explanations give viewers a quick introduction into what you were thinking. It also allows the jurors to understand the parts of the project they are interested in while they are pretending to listen to you talk. I typically like to have a 3 to 4 sentence paragraph on the introduction board summarizing the overall concept and giving viewers a place to start. This board, however, has nothing.

While the large figure ground covering most of the sheet is an important diagram, it should not be the focus of the board. It might have helped to overlay an aerial image or combine multiple diagrams with the figure ground to amp up the message I was trying to get across. In this case, it seems I was more concerned about the composition of the board rather than the information I was trying to convey.

Board 2: The second board isn’t much better. Again, not much information explaining the images. My biggest beef with this board is the waste of space in the gray box on the right side. The images in the box graphically aren’t saying anything. This would be the perfect place for more diagrams or text explanations.

The image at the top left of the board should be removed. It is covering up part of the elevations and is representing a view that already appeared on the first board with the physical models, and will appear again in the next board.

The elevations read extremely flat. I remember spending a lot of time designing the project sectionally, yet I don’t have any drawings showing a section slice through the site. The sections would have provided a much better understanding of the forms and scale of the spaces compared to the elevations that just come off as confusing and hard to read.

Board 3: I remember getting really excited with how these night illustrations turned out. This was the first time I tried this technique, and it had come together better than I was expecting (See the tutorial on how to create these illustrations HERE). The big problem though is that all the rendered images are at bird’s eye view.  Nothing is at eye level describing the experience of actually walking through the site. My thinking at the time was that I thought I could explain the building better with these types of views. But with this approach, I am essentially explaining the design as a sculpture and not as an inhabitable structure. I also show no people in or around the site, making everything feel lifeless. Adding people would have made a big difference in the atmosphere of these illustrations.

The repetition of views in these three boards are horrible. The pics I chose of the physical model are almost identical with the rendered views. While it seems obvious now, at the time, I didn't think twice about it.

While it is easy to look back at past presentations and pick them apart, it has also made me aware of the decisions I tend to make when I'm under a time crunch and has allowed me to work more efficiently the next time around. This is just one project of many so expect to see more critiques later on.

LIGHT STUDIES

I woke up this morning with an idea for a rendering using the villa I designed back in undergrad (same one used in the sketches post). I also wanted to use this time to experiment with some different lighting conditions. Primarily, how to get the back lit louvers to illustrate properly as well as created depth through the use of fog. This was the first pass, although the louvers still could use some work. I may try a different technique later. As always, I spent most of my time in Photoshop. The initial rendering from Kerkythea was rough and I wasn't sure if I would be able to get the look I was going for. However, once I started to insert the surrounding environment, things came together quickly which is typically the case. Below are shots of the SU model and Kerkythea rendering.

Sketchup Linework

Kerkythea Rendering

The illustration before most of the landscaping elements were added.