Train Pavilion Interior Study
I have been experimenting with some interior illustrations and wanted to post a breakdown of this image. Determining the view for this shot has been difficult because there is so much going on in the design, and I wanted to find a view that properly captured...
VA Tumblr Visitor Gallery Inspiration
There has been some beautiful work showing up in the Visualizing Architecture Tumblr gallery lately. Below are some of my favorites. I had trouble narrowing down the selections to just these few, however, these images all have some similar characteristics: 1....
Floor Plan Study
This week, I have begun piecing together the floor plans of the Train Pavilion Project. When it comes to visualizing floor plans, I have always leaned towards a simple representation. Maybe it is because I have spent so many years working in offices where the...
Train Pavilion Diagrams
I have been playing around with some diagrams for the recent train pavilion design. The architecture diagrams that I create on this site have ranged quite a bit over the years. Lately, I have been gravitating towards a minimal approach for these types of...
6 Tips for a Perfect Sky
I can't believe that I have not written a post about skies yet on this blog. In most cases, a sky can make or break an architecture illustration. It's also something that I see a lot of people overlook or only spend a few minutes on in their renderings. The thing is,...
V-Ray Settings Overview
A lot of you have been asking for V-Ray settings and so I am going to spend a little time going over the settings that I used to create the base rendering of the main street perspective in the previous post. I have been using V-Ray for over a year now and I am in...
Back to Business: Main Street Perspective
It's been a while, but I am finally back. I have spent the last several months traveling, giving workshops, settling into a new home, and spending time with family. Needless to say, priorities shifted as they often do and this website unfortunately had to be put on...
Inspiration
I don’t talk a lot about what inspires me but I have been traveling around the country lately giving some workshops and lectures and that question seems to come up a lot. The fact of the matter is that there is no one place that I go to get inspiration and a lot of...
Exploded Axon Part 2
As you have probably noticed, I have not been posting as often as I normally do. Things have been very busy lately, in a good way. Unfortunately, this means that I have not been able to invest as much time as I would have liked to this website. Instead of not...
No-Render Quick Collage
I was in need of some purely right brain thinking so I decided to skip modeling and V-Ray altogether and see what I could turn out with a half baked Sketchup model and some Photoshop. This meant generating a collage style illustration. These types of illustrations are...
New Project: Train Pavillion
The last few weeks have been spent designing a new project that will allow me to experiment with some new rendering styles that I have in mind. The past few projects were located in a dense urban setting so I am switching things up and going rural. I decided on an...
Culture Center Spreads
It has now been several months of working on this latest project from which lots of imagery has been created. I'm ready to start compiling all of this information into portfolio spreads similar to what I did for the wharf project. Anyone that reads this blog knows...
Winter Special #4
For this winter special #4, it was all about the lighting and atmosphere. Going into this, I knew the illustration was going to be heavily post processed so I spent little time preparing the 3d model and just kicked out a quick V-ray base rendering...
Some Thoughts on Texture
A thought that is often running through my head when working on architectural illustrations is how can I bring more of a human touch to the image. The answer is almost always through texturing in Photoshop. I have spent the last week illustrating an aerial perspective...
Day to Night: All Photoshop
One of the very first tutorials I created for this site described a workflow that generated a night scene only using Photoshop. That tutorial used a very simple base image exported right out of Sketchup. The workflow is easy to implement and is especially...