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Paper is Flat
The essence of paper is flat, a dimensional plane. When possible, put your light source in a spot that helps accentuate the big plane changes of your model. This often means placing the light a little off to the side of the model. Angle the light source so either the light or the shadow shapes dominate your design. A 3-to-1 ratio is usually a safe bet.
Atmospheric Perspective
Atmospheric perspective. Often referred to as aerial perspective, atmospheric perspective references the compounded effect that air and light have on objects as they recede. As the reflective light off the object filters its way through the intervening air to the viewer’s eyes (referred to as the line of sight), the contrast between the object and its surroundings diminish, detail decreases, color saturation (chroma) weakens and shifts towards the skylight color, which is generally blue unless it is sunrise or sunset.
Knowing When To Stop
Knowing when to stop is an issue many artist struggle with, particularly those employing a photo-real style. I've created some terrific architectural renderings by not stopping at the "pretty rendering" stage, but instead pushing on to that magical moment when the piece turns into a "capital -B Beautiful rendering. Yearning for something more has become my greatest struggle in creating art.
Know Your Potential Client
Prior to contacting a potential client, do the research. Search the internet to piece together a historic perspective of the company.
Start With Good Photographic References
An architect friend of mine once told me that your rendering will only be as strong as your reference. With enough experience, you may be able to make a successful rendering, no matter how compelling the reference is. However, until you’re making consistently strong, engaging renders, take this idea as gospel: start with good photographic references.
Point and Click (render)
Pulling a camera view and hitting render is much like picking up a point-and-shoot camera and clicking away. Many renderings I'm seeing have exceedingly little that is artistically pleasing. The renderings provide raw information that does not take into account the concept of aesthetics. An artist, working digitally, can manipulate the viewer's eye by leading it through the composition to a specific focal point. The lightest part in an architectural scene is the part that is perpendicular to the light source, and the closer the parts are to the light source, the brighter they will be. You can take some artistic liberties and pitch planes toward and away from light to create drama.
The Race Against the Machine
In Race Against the Machine (which is a terrific read, BTW), Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson make the point that the impact of Moore’s Law is just beginning to hit its radical phase. Andy and Erik use the analogy of the fable of the invention of chess as a way to talk about what happens once the power of exponential improvement really takes hold of processes and people and technology. The way the fable goes is as follows. Supposedly the inventor of the game of chess showed his creation to the Emperor. The Emperor was so delighted by the game that he allows the inventor to name his own reward. The inventor was a clever man, and so he asks for a quantity of rice to be determined as follows: one grain of rice is placed on the first square of the chessboard, two grains on the second, four on the third and so on with each square receiving twice as many grains as the previous one. The Emperor agrees, thinking that this reward is far too small for such a fabulous game.
He is reassured in his thinking during the early phases of the rice doubling because it really doesn't seem that impressive initially. Even after 32 squares, the Emperor has given the inventor only about 4 billion grains of rice. Now that’s an awful lot of rice, but it is only about one large field’s worth. However, it is in the second half of the chessboard that volume of rice becomes overwhelming. In the second half of the chessboard the Emperor ultimately realizes that the number of grains of rice is equal to 2 to the 64th power – 1, or about enough rice to make a mountain the size of Mount Everest.
The point that Andy and Erik make with this fable in terms of technology is that we are now starting to move into the second half of Gordon Moore’s chessboard. It is in the second half of the chessboard that technology change accelerates. And if the changes and improvements in hardware technology (as represented by semiconductor capacity) are not impressive enough, our ability to create software and algorithms improves even more quickly than our ability to improve the hardware.
What's Your Message?
Like every painting, every rendering, should have a message. The message may not be earth shattering, and your viewer may read something different, but, nerveless, a message should always be there. Having something to say is the most valuable thing and illustrator can have!
Search out the Composition
Sometimes ideas for composition just come to you, fully formed. Other times you have to build them from scratch. In both cases, you still need to play with the idea to develop it. Once you start to render, there many other things to work out that you may not notice serious compositional flaws. Once you have committed a lot of effort to developing a view, you may be reluctant to make changes.
If ten people set up to render the same thing you'll get ten different renders People see from different points of view, both literally and figuratively. Everyone has cliched ways of looking at things. Breaking those habits and taking a fresh viewpoint is vital to the artistic process. You know the experience of seeing something familiar as if for the first time; it seems alive and exciting. That's the way you want to try to see things before you render.
Rhythm in your Rendering
If any interval, or rhythm, in your rendering, becomes too repetitious or systematic, it feels lifeless and unnatural. This remains a typical problem that afflicts beginners, but it happens to me all the time. In art, the principle of line rhythm is essential in creating a hierarchy of information that feels comfortable and natural for your viewer to interpret. Without variety, your rendering can become wallpaper fading into the background of our attention. Like an endless row of fence post, we cease to notice or pay attention.
Too much variation is incredibly disruptive, Each decision you make when putting information into your model has visual implications. Not enough unity and you have confusion. Too much unity and you are bored.
Learning a New Skill
Most learning we do is conceptual learning, which is quite different from developing a skill. Conceptual learning is a process of developing an understanding of a subject and can often be done through listening or reading. This is primarily intellectual. In developing a skill, there is also understanding, but this understanding must be coupled with the practice of what you are learning. Sometimes you must practice without an intellectual understanding because that comes only when you can do it. Learning conceptual subjects can sometimes be done extremely rapidly. But learning a skill, is rarely something that can be acquired immediately. You must master each aspect of the skill before going on to the next. In learning new skills, practice a little bit every day. If you try to learn it all at once, you may wind up understanding how it is done but not be able to do it exceedingly well.
Sunshine Adds Pizzazz
Sunshine adds pizzazz to your rendering and makes life seem more charismatic. The human eye sees in three dimensions and can compensate for poor lighting. A rendering is only two-dimensional; therefore, to make an impression of form, depth, and texture to the subject, you should ideally have the light come from the side or at least at an angle.
The Snow Is Not White
We, as architectural illustrators, have to see the world with an artist's eye. Often, I get questions, about how I create such realistic renderings. My reply is simply, use a lot of real world references and try to recreate it virtually. Our brain often plays tricks with our eyes. We tend to see what we want to see and not what reality is. Try this. Grab a photo of a snowy day (just an example) and using an image editor like Photoshop sample the color of the snow. You'll find that the snow isn't actually white at all, but our brian knows snow to be white, so it is overriding what we actually see.
Most of the time, when we look at the world, we aren’t actually looking at all. Instead, we are relying on the knowledge about the world we have stored up over years. We know the table is flat, so we don’t actually bother to observe how that flat rectangle on four sticks looks out there in the world from the particular position in which we are currently standing.
Our brains operate as efficiently as possible to filter the wealth of information coming through our senses. In fact, we don’t truly see with our eyes at all – we see with our brains. Only those things which are unusual, a potential threat, or have changed significantly, cause the brain to react – our attention is caught and for once we are genuinely looking at what is out there.
When we were children we looked at the world like this most of the time – everything was new to us – exciting and waiting for us to discover it. As we got older, less things were new. We’d already seen so many trees we stopped looking at bark patterns, the same happened with the clouds in the sky and on it went – as our body of knowledge grew ever larger we paid less and less attention to those things we had seen before’.
Fortunately it is possible to recapture that the ability to pay attention to the world again – and to look at things directly rather than filtered through a cloud of knowledge. Some knowledge is of course required for rendering, but make sure it’s the right knowledge. The laws of perspective, what something looks like from every angle – this is the kind of knowledge you need and will develop as you learn how to render.
One of the most crucial part of a photo-real architectural rendering is textures. In my snow example If, you make your snow white it will not be natural; it'll look off and your viewer will sense something is wrong. Try adding either a fresnel reflection or tinting your snow material blue, which is actually what is happening in real life.
Window Masking
http://youtu.be/9oVM1PJ20Y8 When it come to architectural renderings, one of the first things to learn is to create good masks to retouch objects in Adobe® Photoshop®. In this video I'm using Autodesk® 3ds Max®, V-Ray for 3ds Max, and Adobe® Photoshop®, to create glass reflections.
The Little Things
Argh. It’s not quite what I was hoping it would be... BUT I JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO!
REBIRTH of GAEA - Flowing Meditation
A layer-by-layer deconstruction of "Flowing Meditation," part of REBIRTH of GAEA, an epic visual tapestry delicately interweaving reflections on the environment and spirituality through the rich imagery of Greek Mythology.
My daughter Emma has had a deep connection to the environment for as long as I can remember. As she grew older and became enchanted with Greek Mythology, I decided to show my support for her interests by creating REBIRTH of GAEA, depicting her as the Goddess of Earth.
The song is "You're Too Late Satan" by Worm Is Green, an amazing Icelandic group mixing sparse electronic beats and glossy trip-hop threads.
Sesame Street Primary Colors
I caught my 6 years old daughter, Emma Grace, watching this on Youtube
Tradigital Drawing
Here is a short video describing how I accomplished a tradigital watercolor.
Abstract Masses
The french poet Paul Valery observed, "To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees." This is a perfect expression of the mind-set for rendering. Something has to shift. Maybe it's a shift from left brain to right brain; but that shift seems absolutely necessary to create a strong composition. Until the shift is made and you start thinking in abstract masses on a rendering scene, you are, in sense, on the outside of the rendering process looking in.