I wanted to share some recent work, just completed a couple weeks ago. These renderings are for a proposed office building in Boston, MA along the Massachusetts Turnpike. The building is predominately curtain wall. I don't know if others have experienced this, but for me glass buildings are always a challenge to render because the reading of the glass is affected by many factors. These being: internal illumination levels, sky/clouds, sun position/time of day, buildings/ other context around the site, kind of glass (Low-E, reflective, tinted, etc...) and imperfections in the glass itself. I think the glass is represented honestly, but the ultimate judge will be how the built building turns out.

Most of my work would fall into the NPR category, and these are no exception. I rely heavily on using photo-montaged context to create the scenes, I think it just adds so much character that I could never model. For comparison I added one view as a raw SketchUp output of the first image.

SketchUp/ Kerkythea/ Photoshop workflow

more info here: http://www.smma.com/work/upward-momentum

@jakob_2704 said:

With what extension/program did you render it?

This scene is rendered in Kerkythea. The raw rendering was then taken into Photoshop for post production.

This is a rendering where I tried to capture the warmth and energy of the place. I paid special attention to how the patients, families, and doctors are interacting with each other. I usually don't use 3d modeled people but for scenes where the camera is above the action its hard to find photos of people from above. These people models are from FormFonts. I think they work from this distance and angle.

The focus of the scene is really on the outer perimeter of infusion rooms. I tried to coax some sense of atmosphere with the glow of the lighting and softened shadows.

SketchUp/Kerkythea/Photoshop

Great light, materials, and atmosphere in these. Only critique would be that vertical lines are slightly askew, like in the first image on the right edge where tall cabinet meets the wall.

This was a little different process for me because this image was to be printed on a 12' wide by 5' high construction site banner. We also had a construction document level Revit model. Instead of exporting the Revit into SketchUp and doing my normal SketchUp-to-Kerythea workflow, we rendered a very high resolution image of just the building in the A360 cloud.

SketchUp was used for the adjacent residence hall, walkways, and roadway. Photoshop was used to add all the foreground site textures, trees, people, and sky.

We do a lot of renderings that are set in the summer; green grass, green trees, etc. But for this one I wanted to present the atmosphere an autumn day on campus.

This building is currently under construction at Providence College:
http://webcam2.providence.edu/view/view.shtml?id=339%26amp;imagepath=%2Fmjpg%2F1%2Fvideo.mjpg%26amp;size=1

Thank you Richard, appreciate the comment!

Looks good, very clear. Like the use of a simple color palette. I would suggest some minor adjustments:

1. The houses walls are slanted because of the perspective, would try to make these truly vertical. Especially because you have angular roof lines and the rotated note. To many non-perpendicular lines can become distracting.

2. Might be good if there is more space between the top of the note and the bottom of the house. This graphical tangent, where the note is almost at the same angle as the bottom of the house, causes the eye to focus on the interaction of these two graphics and not on the content.

3. If you are showing most flattering face of the house, I think rotating the view to show the front door might be good to explore. You could even show some people walking up or through an open door, so the eye is invited in.

Hope these are helpful.

Time for the final post in this 4-part series. The design has become more brand-forward, echoing the architecture seen in the client's retail work. These renderings were created during the construction document phase so you will see the final product is pretty true to the renderings in terms of construction. Some interior finishes, like the wood in the reception hall changed between rendering and construction. I am always interested in seeing things I rendered versus the built project. There's always a lot to learn about materials and light to improve your future work.

For the exterior renderings I always have a struggle of showing the reality of glass during the day (which is often reflective and dark)and my desire to show a little bit of interior warmth. In the end I take some artistic license and pump up the interior illumination so you can see a little life inside. An additional scene at dusk/dawn, where the building becomes a lantern, would have done the trick too.

For this model, I exported our Revit construction document model and cleaned it up and added materials in SketchUp. Rendered these views in Kerkythea and did post production in Photoshop.

Thank you pbacot!

This is the third set of renderings for the kayaking center. During this phase we began working closely with the client, so you will notice that the design has evolved from the competition proposal previously posted. These views were created about halfway through schematic design.

Again, a similar workflow as previous posts: SketchUp, Kerkythea, and Photoshop.