Renderings and Eye Candy

Photo-realism…
A lot of us in the office have some kind of skill in architectural rendering, whether it is with Photoshop, SketchUp, or a good old pen and Prismacolors. But Troy, our visualization artist, is an expert and his specialty is photo-realism. Here are a few perspective renderings from a recent project and Troy’s description of his process:

…utilizing the architectural CD’s, drawings such as the basic floor plans, site plan, roof plan and elevations are exported for use in 3ds Max Design as a guide to construct the building and site geometry which accurately depicts the new building in its surrounding context.

Once the model is created, the process of assigning specific material selections to each object(s) begins. The color, texture and other dynamics for each material are selected and assigned to the objects taking into account the size and scale of the textures.

The next step is to study and setup the lighting conditions that will work for each viewpoint. Once the lighting is in place and low-quality testing is complete and satisfactory the large format final is rendered. The final render takes 4 to 6 hours to produce for each view, which is dependent on the complexity and proximity to geometry. The close-up view therefore took longer than the overall views because it’s much closer to the building where it’s rendering more detail and having to calculate more information for reflections and textures.

Finally, detail enhancements and color adjustments are done in Photoshop to complete the final rendering along with adding landscaping and people to give it a sense of realism and scale. Leveling and bloom effects are also added in Photoshop to give it some additional punch.

 – Troy Hines