Contrast and Emphasis
Contrast is emphasis. The sharpest contrast should be where you want the eye to go first. Contrast comes in many forms, including value, color, detail and line.
Value Contrast
The most important element is the value; the most influential of the principles is contrast. Put them together and you have a kind of contrast that packs the most punch.
Color Contrast
This usually refers to contrast in hue or temperature, but intensity also can play a role. A power struggle ensues when hues are equally intense. One must dominate, or the eye won't know where to look.
Contrast in Complexity
Just as brightness is enhanced by neutrality, detail, texture and pattern are more exciting next to areas of simplicity.
Contrast in Line
A rendering with entirely horizontal lines is effectively no rendering at all. When even a minimum of diagonal and vertical lines is added, the improvement is dramatic.
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Many 3D Artists Feel Intimidated by Design
Architectural illustrations and 3D renderings are the same thing as composition. Despite rumours to the contrary, there's no imperative difference. They both boil down to what you put where. We make decisions then we place 3D geometry in one place or another on our screen.
Composition and design are ultimately what an architectural illustration and 3D rendering is about. Many 3D artists feel intimidated by design, that it's more than they want to deal with. They push it into the back-burner and hope that somehow it will take care of itself. However, the fact is that design can be demystified - and it must be, since consistently successful results come no other way.
Mountain climbing seems to mirror the act of creating 3D art. Does anyone just forgo planning and "hit the road" to reach the peak? Obviously, not if you intent to see the view from the top, and not if you plan to get there again. Happy accidents seldom happen when climbing to great heights. That requires understanding, planning and practice.
Even with a plan, success is never guaranteed. It just improves the chances. Good composition requires a well-developed sense of design. How do you require good design? You study, observe, and ask questions. In the process, you learn to see critically. And you render - a lot, while consciously applying the concepts you've discovered.
We're all aware that there's much about art that is intuitive. But few realise how much of art is logical and reasonable. It can be understood. And, once understood and absorbed, eventually it becomes second nature. Anyone who sets out with serious intent can master design.
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A Rendering with Flare
Flare adds atmosphere of a kind, and also a sense of actuality. Certainly, for strongly manipulated and special-effects imagery, adding flare can be a useful way of helping to convince the viewer that a scene is genuine.
The polygonal flare patterns that are created by internal aperture reflections and refractions from a point source of light (such as the sun) that is either just inside or just outside the picture frame.
From your final 3D rendering, inside your post processing application, you can add your flare. For the most part, you add a flare for a treatment that conveys the intensity of the sun and a general feeling of heat. The software I use is the Knoll Light Factory plug-in for Photoshop.
Keeping the generated flare on a separate layer makes it easy to align with the sun and the rest of your 3D scene.
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The Properties of Color
Any color has three basic properties - it's hue, its tone, and its intensity. Hue means the color as identified by its name - red or blue, for example. Tone means the lightness or darkness of a color. You can, for instance, have a light blue or a dark blue. In addition to the properties of hue and tone, colors have a varying degree of intensity. Two reds may be identical in tone and yet be clearly different, with one more intense, or brighter, than the other. The difference in intensity is sometimes called color saturation.
When you use the word color, you are generally referring to these three properties - hue, tone, and intensity - simultaneously. However, it is helpful to be able to identify them separately because when you notice that a color is "wrong", you will be better able to pinpoint what is wrong with it - whether it is too light in tone or too intense.
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John Maeda: How art, technology and design inform creative leaders
John Maeda, President of the Rhode Island School of Design, delivers a funny and charming talk that spans a lifetime of work in art, design and technology, concluding with a picture of creative leadership in the future. Watch for demos of Maeda’s earliest work -- and even a computer made of people.
John Maeda is the president of the Rhode Island School of Design, where he is dedicated to linking design and technology. Through the software tools, web pages and books he creates, he spreads his philosophy of elegant simplicity.
Softness and Building Blur
Bryan O'Neil Hughes explains the importance of softness and shallow depth of field in photographs and how it is possible to mimic it in Photoshop CS6.
Perfect Reflection
When rendering a building with a large expanse of water in front of it, the classic approach is to include the reflection, along with the whole building, to create a symmetrical rendering. For a perfect reflection you’ll need water to be as still as possible, so this technique won’t work on water with large bump maps, or noise. That said, you can also look for much smaller areas of water that reflect just a small detail of the building to add foreground interest to your rendering. On rainy days renders, you can even look out for reflections in puddles or rain-soaked streets. This technique is particularly good at night, when you can include bright lights in the reflection.
With reflections, it pays to explore lots of different camera views – don’t just render the first composition that presents itself. An inch to the left or right, or up or down, can make a big difference to how a reflection fits in a pond or puddle.
Lens Distortion
You’d normally want to avoid any type of lens distortion when rendering architecture, but a virtual fisheye lens can add a creative twist to your renderings. This distorted style of the rendering isn't to everyone’s taste, but used sparingly – and with the right subjects – it can produce very striking renders.
Fisheye lenses come in two main types – those that give completely circular images, and those that produce conventional rectangular ones. But both will cause straight lines in your image to bulge outwards, especially at the edges.
Because the distorted renders from a fisheye break many of the ‘rules’ of rendering architecture, they often lend themselves to unusual framing and viewpoints. Try rendering with the lens pointing directly upwards to shoot ceilings or roofs, for example. The circular nature of fisheye renders is also perfect for symmetrical or even circular subjects.
You Don’t Have to Render the Whole Building
You don’t have to render the whole building for stunning architectural renderings. You can isolate details such as windows or columns to produce renderings with a ton of impact. Glass, metal and concrete structures, are full of graphic details that are perfect for producing this type of renderings, but you can also find them in older buildings.
The key to this style of rendering is simplicity, so look for areas of the building that you can isolate from their surroundings, or repetitive patterns in the structure. Then try rendering them either straight on to make the most of repetitive patterns, or at a deliberate angle for more dynamic images.