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 many of the design elements. Ultimately, I will probably need to create several interior shots to tell the full story, but this one seemed to do the job of expressing the layering of the elements.

 

The breakdown of the image is like most of the others that I post. I started with a Sketchup model and created some textures for the metal and wood materials.

 

Train_Interior_1_SU_Linework

Sketchup model with textures off

 

Train_Interior_2_SU_Textures

Sketchup model with textures on

 

Train_Interior_3_VRay_BaseRender

Base rendering directly out of V-Ray

 

Train_Interior_7_FinalImage

Final image after Photoshop post processing

 

 

There are several things that I was juggling in my head when I was deciding on the view. The design contains several layers of structure and sun shading devices. I wanted the view to express these elements and show how these layered on top of one another. This meant shifting the view around quite a bit to avoid certain walls covering up other walls,  or letting steel structures block views of the context. The materials themselves also help express the layering by using dark and light tones along with cool and warm tones. Finally, a hint of atmospheric haze was added to give a better sense of depth and further enhance the layering effect.

 

Train_Interior_5_Layers

 

 

 

I also knew that I wanted to play up the contrast of the bright exterior from the shadow generated by the shading canopies.  What is nice about this view is that the light areas of the image creates a strong diagonal move across the illustration. This is not only nice compositionally, but it also encourages the viewers’ eyes to move around the page.

 

Train_Interior_6_Contrast

 

 

 

Finally, the view takes into account the rule of thirds. The horizon is placed directly on the bottom third of the page and the converging lines of the perspective fall on the right third of the image.  I don’t always follow the rule of thirds, but it is something that I keep in the back of my mind when setting up images.

 

Train_Interior_4_RuleofThirds

 

 

I rendered the image out at 5000px x 3125px on my Macbook Pro and it took about 2 hours. This isn’t bad considering the resolution that I am working with.  I spent quite a bit more time in Photoshop but the point is that you don’t need massive rendering farms to be able to generate high res images. With that said, I am not using displacement maps on any of the textures nor am I loading the scene with a ton of lights which can really increase rendering times. My Photoshop file grew to just over 1.5 gb in size which is typical for my illustrations at 5,000px wide. In my experience, images over 6k or 7k px wide with lots of layers will start to generate PSD files that are difficult to manage unless you have an amazing graphics card.

 

Train_Interior_7_FinalImage_Cropped2

Train_Interior_7_FinalImage_Cropped

 

One final note about this site, I have went through and re-embedded all of the videos so hopefully everything this up and running again. However, if you come across any videos that are still not showing up, send me an email or leave a comment and I will try to fix it as soon as I can.