When I build a project, I work the way I have since working with watercolor. With watercolor and paper, you start boxing things out with a thin pencil. You refine things as you go, building in detail and adding color. I describe it as working from a broad brush to a fine brush.
In digital art, initially, I’ll mass out your structure using primitive shapes. Think of this as a broad brush. I’ll then add more information, get approval, and continue to add details; this would be a fine brush. Most will have stopped once the basic model is built; the extra detail is usually missing, which is critical in perfecting an architectural rendering.
“You perfect with imperfections!”
In the real world, nothing is perfect; everything has imperfections. If I am working on an interior and placing stools along a kitchen island. I try to think like someone staging an interior space for a photoshoot or an open house, so I line the stools up. I try to space things correctly, but then I slightly rotate each stool, barely moving them in/out and back/forth, so things are imperfect.
Exteriors, everything has an imperfection. I miter all corners so light hits the edges. Ground always has an uneven grade and is never totally flat. I also try to think like a photographer when pulling my camera views. I use real-world camera settings, and I try to frame my shots. Balancing lighting is essential, and so is composition.
One tail-tail sign of working with a professional is everything is subtle. You don’t know why the image looks good, but you know it does. Nothing is over the top, which tends to look tacky and unprofessional. Ludwig Mies van der Roh said it best when saying Less is more.
“Less is more. ”
My client never sees their final image unless I have put it aside for at least a day so that I can come back to it with a fresh eye. I squint, flip the image back and forth, look at it in black and white, and even see it as a tiny thumbnail. These are all tricks of the trade I learned from hand drawing. I would venture to say that most architectural illustrators today have never drawn by hand.
Here are some grayscale renderings showing the detail I put into my images. I work on small and mammoth homes, like this mammoth example home, all get the same detail.
The model is about half of the work. After the model is built and all the details have been added, I make the best textures possible. These are not things I can grab from the web for free: low-resolution and not tiling. Each material is custom-created, with many layers. All the geometry gets proper UVWs, which means all the grains go the correct way. Each material has a specular map (shininess or reflectivity), a glossy map (map will control how reflective a surface is), a normal map (faking the lighting of bumps and dents), a bump map (simulates small surface displacements), and a displacement map (create the illusion of depth).
Above is a mammoth house in grayscale, and below are some of my smallest houses with colors and materials. Like cooking with the best ingredients for a feast, having the right amount of detail in the model and materials gives your eye a feast to enjoy.
Did you enjoy this article? I would love to hear your thoughts, so don’t be shy and comment below! Please don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS-feed or follow my feed on Twitter and Facebook. ! If you enjoyed the following article, we humbly ask you to comment and help us spread the word! Or, if you would like, drop me an email.