HONDURAS ILLUSTRATIONS

I just finished a series of illustrations for a small project the office is working on in Honduras. The project is a memorial, therefore we wanted the illustrations to take on a meditative and quiet atmosphere. Two renderings were created of the same view to explain the different lighting scenarios a visitor would experience both during the day and the night.

The workflow used for these two images are similar to what I use for many of the illustrations on this site. Because I wanted the illustrations to have a "painted" look, I didn't overlay Sketchup linework like I normally do. Instead, I spent more time layering textures and manually painting in Photoshop.

SKETCHUP LINEWORK

Although I didn't show the linework as an overlay in the final image, I still like to keep it as a separate layer in my Photoshop files so that I can use it to make quick selections with the Magic Wand Tool.

Sketchup Model Textures

The above image shows what kind of textures and detail level the Sketchup model contained. As you can see, the textures are basic. I knew going into these illustrations that applying textures in Photoshop was going to make or break the final result.

KERKYTHEA RENDERING

The Kerkythea rendering is the image I began with for the illustrations. I tend not to spend too much time tweaking the settings in hopes of getting a perfect rendering. This kills too much time. For this view, I really only focused on getting the shadows to render correctly and give the floor reflections. The darkness didn't bother me because I knew this would be fixed in Photoshop.

TEXTURES

For these illustrations, correct textures were really important. I did not spend too much time adding textures in the 3D model because it is almost impossible to avoid the "tiling effect". Instead,  I extracted stucco finishes right out of photos of local Honduras buidlings. Also in this step, I took the smudge tool to rough up the polished concrete floor and spent time using the burn and dodge tools to punch up the shadows and highlights.

COLOR OVERLAYS

The last step was to add color overlays. For this particular rendering, I probably had 5 or 6 different color overlays. For example, over by the doors, I used a soft white overlay to fade the trees in the background and brighten the light entering the space. I used a yellow overlay on the right side where the light is washing the wall to warm this area up. Over the entire image, I used a light orange overlay. Each of these layers are serving a particular purpose, however they all bleed into each other bringing a level of cohesiveness to the overall image.

The above images are property of Paul Lukez Architecture. More information on this project can be found at www.lukez.com

WATER REFLECTION TUTORIAL (VIDEO)

Taking inspiration right out of the Bob Ross playbook, I put together this little tutorial showing a really easy and fast way to Photoshop a water reflection into an architectural illustration. You may notice some correlation to my “Wet Street” tutorial, however, this tutorial has some minor changes and uses a little cleaner workflow. I have been wanting to do a water reflection tutorial for a while now, and finally was able to come up with an easy enough workflow that still looks good and worthy of a post.

One other thing, some views may not be at eye level like the video shows where you can simply mirror the building for the reflection. In cases where the camera is at a bird’s eye view, I would suggest just rendering a glass surface in place of the water in Kerkythea, before Photoshopping. This will give an accurate reflection and doesn’t add to the rendering time.

Above, the initial image before post-processing

Above, the final image with the water reflection added using only Photoshop

WORK ILLUSTRATION: PART 2

The office is sending me to China all of next week for an exciting project that has been ongoing for a year now. After all of the preperation and packing, I haven't had a lot of time to finish the tutorial continuing off of the Landscape Tutorial started last week. I dug around and found the above illustration and realized that I never posted it. The image was the second of three illustrations I developed for our office to give the clients a sense of where the design was going. One of the other images can be seen in the post called "HDR ILLUSTRATION" added a few weeks back. Both of these illustrations had a limited time frame, about 5 to 6 hours each to be produced. The Sketchup model is huge, about 90 MBs and that is without trees or large poly objects, just architecture. Because of the limited time frame, large model, and not having a farm of computers at my disposal, the Kerkythea base renderings were rendered at a pretty low resolution and low settings. As with a lot of my illustrations, I just Photoshopped the hell out of them.

Below are some image exports from Sketchup and the base Kerkythea rendering. The final post-processed result is a big leap from the kerkythea rendering.

Above: Sketchup linework

Above: Sketchup image export with textures

Above: Kerkythea base rendering. To save rendering time, minimal lights were added.

The final post-processed result utilizes a lot of color overlays, burning and dodging. The people and landscaping softens the architecture and gives the image life.

This illustration was part of a series of illustrations created for and are property of Paul Lukez Architecture.

WORKFLOW VIDEO: LANDSCAPE VIA PHOTOSHOP

This video builds off of the post from last week explaining the workflow I used to add landscaping elements via Photoshop. There was a lot of information to cover in a short amount of time, so the video slows down at important stages of the process and speeds up where the steps have already been discussed and would be redundant to explain again. You will probably notice a lot of similarities to the GRASS TUTORIAL, however this video better explains how to handle shadows as well as adding trees and vines.

Below, the starting point of the video before post processing

Below,The image after the landscape has been added using Photoshop

If you look at the last post you will notice that there is still some post processing to be done. I will try to cover this in the future. Its mostly simple stuff such as adding people and color overlays. See you next week.

VILLA ILLUSTRATIONS 2 & 3

These are the other two villa illustrations created alongside the exterior night rendering a few posts down. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the kerkythea base rendering used for the exterior image. Like the others, a ton of time went into post processing both images. The clients preferred a really monochromatic material selection of stone and concrete. This meant playing up the stone textures and experimenting with different light tones to add a little interest to the illustrations.

You will notice I used the wet street look (tutorial here) for the driveway. I rendered the driveway with a simple mirror reflection in Kerkythea, then added a stone texture and smudged the reflective surface in Photoshop to get the final result.

Above: Sketchup image export

Above: Kerkythea base image rendering

Exported Sketchup model image

Images in this post property of PAUL LUKEZ ARCHITECTURE.

KERKYTHEA TUTORIAL PART 3: NIGHT RENDERING

DOWNLOAD SKETCHUP FILE

DOWNLOAD KERKYTHEA SCENE

In Part 3 of the Kerkythea tutorials, I explain the process of creating night renderings. Instead of using Kerkythea lights, I go a different route and paint surfaces in Sketchup, then tell that material to emit light in Kerkythea. This method allows you create lights that work with the spaces of the design and avoids navigating around within Kerkythea. I have attached the SU and Kerkythea files so you can see the settings and practice.

NOTES:

The more lights you have, the longer the rendering will take. This rendering only uses a few, leaving some areas darker than they should be. This will allow me to show some post processing tricks in the next tutorial.

Make sure the color you use for the lights in Sketchup is not used anywhere else in the model to avoid lighting areas you don’t want to in Kerkythea.

Use multiple materials for different lights so that each can be adjusted differently in Kerkythea.

Use simple shapes for the lights. The more facets the object has, the more calculations the program will have to do, really increasing rendering times. For example, don’t use a sphere for a light.

KERKYTHEA TUTORIAL: PART 1 BASICS

The video describes the steps I use when creating a base image for architectural illustrations. Kerkythea is simple to get started with, but has sophisticated settings to produce very professional final outcomes.

Kerkythea and the Sketchup Plugin can be downloaded HERE. The Plugin can be found under Integration along with easy install instructions

If used correctly, Kerkythea can be quick. However, as you fine tune the rendering settings, add more lights, soften the shadows, give the material textures and bumpmaps, you will quickly find out that the rendering times exponentially grow. I will most often do the bare minimum, to get my rendering times down, then put more effort in post processing. However, there are times when spending the extra effort to add nice textures and lights outweigh the time it takes to post process in photoshop. Either way, it's good to know what pieces significantly alter rendering time.

Things that extend rendering times:

Multiple lights. Adding more lights slows the rendering time. Lights that are made up of many surfaces, such as a sphere, make it even worse.

Lots of geometry. This one is obvious, but using a lot of trees or just really big models will really increase rendering times. Deleting part of the model so that only objects in view remain is something I do a lot.

Complex textures. Textures with a lot of reflection or shininess really slow things down. Use these textures sparingly.

Soft shadows.

Presets. Choosing the right preset makes a big difference. Photonmap-High+AA03 seems to be the quickest for me. Metropolis Light Transport looks the best, but can take days to render.

PHOTOSHOP BRUSHES

Check out this website for a huge archive of Photoshop brushes. Ive used this place for years and it has really changed the look of my work.  I tend to focus in on the grunge brushes and the dry paint brushes. The effects can be see in the night Jindu rendering sky that I posted a while ago. They are also great for breaking out of the clean "illustrator" look that is easy to get into when working on portfolios and presentation boards.