Tutorial: Hand Rendering Elevations

Hand Rendered Elevation

Elevations are an important part of architectural design. There are many ways to create elevations. You can use Sketchup, AutoCAD, Revit or one of the many other rendering programs out there. Creating a three dimensional model for elevations is very time consuming and creating a two dimensional elevations in AutoCAD also requires a lot of time and effort to get the right textures and line weights, much less taking the time to render them in Photoshop. Thus, the quickest way to create an elevation is to complete them by hand. This way you can also choose the detail of the rendering depending on the amount of time you have as well as work through elevation iterations to define your ideas without the hassle of computer rendering.

Photoshop: Transform a Picture into an Architectural Blueprint

Creating a blueprint in Photoshop is fairly easy and straight forward. The following video by Blue Lightning TV outlines all the steps and techniques in order to transform a picture into an architectural blueprint. There are also many interesting tips and trick in this video with layering, brushes and masking tips.

Architectural Rendering: Using Scale People

When adding people to an architectural render it is important to keep them in scale so everything about the render looks correct. So how do I keep them in scale and where do I find people to add?

In AutoCAD

The first way is to add people into your AutoCAD drawing before you import them into Photoshop. This is the simplest way to keep people to scale. There are free CAD blocks online with people that you can add to your building drawings. The blocks are generally not too well defined and you can't manipulate the people too much in Photoshop once imported along with your building drawing. If you are doing quick renderings, keeping people in your imported drawing would help you save a bit of time.

Plan Rendering in Photoshop

Screen shot from the following video by wchmarrero