Breaking down an exterior dusk render Lumion 11 and Photoshop

hey guys welcome to show better my name is steven and today we're gonna see how we go from this image to this image so let's start okay so it's been a while since i've uploaded one of these videos these were basically the videos that i uploaded when i was starting the channel and i really liked this style very much but i really hadn't practiced much since i don't know some years a year or two i hadn't practiced doing actual renders so this one i did it you know half in lumion half in photoshop and i really like the results i think you can do a lot more things to it but i like the result and i wanted to show you guys the result since this whole image took me about three hours then i'm gonna i'm not gonna show you the whole three hours in this video because it would be too long and honestly you know what nobody would see it so right here i'm going to try to deconstruct the most important parts of the process of making the image like you know what did i do in lumion what did i do in photoshop that was special that made this image uh you know what uh you know the final result that you guys see and if you guys are interested in seeing the whole three hour video photoshop file or then you can go and access it in my patreon page and support the channel and also get access to all the files of all the videos that we see here so without further ado then let's start okay so the first step was the 3d model 3d model was downloaded from the 3d warehouse and i instantly opened my sync i opened my lumion 11 and i live synced it so i could uh you know model or what i needed to model and also update the view because i was only going to work with one view so i wanted to be as efficient as possible i only modified some materials it wasn't that important just you know the basic concrete glass things that you need but it wasn't that important what i did do is that each time i made a very small advance even if i just added a texture if i added something then i would take a render out of it that is so i could see the whole advancement from the first image to the last image so as you guys can see i also corrected some things in the model that weren't updated so this is mostly sketchup me just copying and pasting elements that were already done and i also wanted to go for that hero look so if you guys can see in the composition of the lumion there's already a composition of of the building that has a two-point perspective activated so that is the most important thing so the model was very very basic and that was it now i think one of the most important things that i did in this process was create a perspective that or a point of view that and that was in such a way that you couldn't see the rest of the model you can just see what was in front so i decided to create a park like a small terrain that i did this with the sand option in sketchup so as you guys can see i just created a terrain and you know i i went back on lumion and then back to sketchup and seeing which perspective worked best what i wanted to do what my goal was is that if i had this in the right way in the right perspective then i wouldn't have to invest so much time in the background creating um you know buildings people that that is what i didn't want to do because it would just take too much time so what i did was i created a terrain and with that terrain i painted it in different materials right so for the first one i i painted it so it could be like a wild type of grass the second one so it could be a different type of grass that you guys can find on lumion and as you guys can see as well i also created some the forest in the background so you can just slightly see it but it was uh it was one of those forest uh packs that are embedded in lumion and as you guys can see i'm also painting in this grid that i created with the sandbox tool in lumion and it was just painting in two types of grasses the first one is the wild grass which was the one most closest to the camera the second one was the row grass and then i also painted in a table a type of path so you could direct your view so the you know the composition could be with the tap a path that goes into the building which looks makes it makes it look much much more interesting and kind of has to tell a story and i could tell put people there etc so it would just be interesting after that i started putting trees and obviously these you know that was the good thing about this terrain that i created is that i didn't have to put a lot of trees in the foreground because uh you know the that small mountain that i created was gonna hide the majority of them so i just made sure i put some important trees that generated first of all shadows on the main building and second of all just uh fit the composition really well i also put a small bench that you can find in the lumion library and i put some light posts and that was it for that process it it wasn't really that long that park but it was just about creating an important things that uh just made the whole image the whole environment um very very interesting the bad thing about this is that lumion has a lot of you know generic kind of things so sometimes it doesn't look that well the next thing i did was import some context buildings uh since i wanted this to i had in mind that the the main image was going to be very very important the main building was going to be very important i just needed some context buildings for reflections and not to be such notorious not to be very relevant so it didn't really matter that these were the models from lumion in the best case scenario you don't want to use this you want to use buildings that you know that are from your context or that are buildings that maybe have a lot of a bit of variety to them but if you use buildings that aren't in lumion the chances are that your images are going to look kind of generic but in this case i wanted to use those because they weren't going to get so much attention in the composition frame i also uh you know went back this is this is really important that i always went back to the print mainframe of the composition so i knew this was going to be the mainframe and i created everything so it could be uh beneficial for that mainframe so it didn't matter if if when you're in the building mode in lumion this wasn't modeled correctly or there wasn't any texture of road in this part etc that didn't matter to me because it was all built up so it can look in the best way to the frame not to the actual 3d model i also started importing things like fences like light posts uh you know things that i think the more time you have to put details in your in your render it's it's gonna be better right eventually it's gonna look better but if you don't have a lot of time then you know you just try to hide some things but i tried to start importing you know different kinds of buildings fences maybe some light posts and also i was thinking about the pers the the light of the specific moment that i wanted the render to be on so it wasn't just like a generic light but i wanted to be a kind of a sunset kind of uh you know where the sun was really really low so i wanted some shadows to project onto the building since the building had a lot of glass i also wanted the glass to reflect you know the context buildings and i also wanted a lot of trees to be in the foreground so i could have a lot of shadow first of all in the foreground and then all the light from the sun was on the building so that was the contrast that i wanted to make this is i mean this is not uh this is not accidental if you want to increase the contrast if you want to give more importance to importance to the building then what i suggest is that first of all you maybe generate contrast in the light in the shadow so if you want to place light where the things are important maybe a building maybe a person then put light there and then put the rest in shadow so put some trees put some buildings so they can generate shadow in the places that you don't want a lot of attention and finally i adjusted you know the the whole all the things that that are in lumion so these weren't uh i never i never used one of these filters one of these styles that come in lumion i tried to avoid them for this image because i know that it could give me a more generic look than what it already had and i knew i didn't want to go for that look so i didn't choose a style of realistic or daytime overcast none of that i tried to do that to everything from scratch in order to have a different kind of feel to to the image even though i think at the end i already got a lumia very luminous style image and i could maybe improve that by changing maybe the sky or the materials but uh but i suggest not not to use those custom styles at first because they can get very generic very quick so if you can get if you can use your own style create your own style it would be much much better i tried to set up two views because i wasn't really sure if i wanted to do a sunset view uh or a really like dusk kind of view where you didn't see the sun it was just a little bit of light and i think i opted that for that at the end the final adjustments at lumion weren't that important but what i recommend is having the two point perspective uh on i also recommend using the reflections and i also recommend using all the elements that you can have i imported some mountains from textures.com this is a free website where you can download textures so it's textures.com and i imported a plane and then on that you know on the rectangular plane i painted it with the the material of a mountain so i could have a more interesting background as you guys can see and i duplicated that mountain twice was for the right side of the image and the other one was for the left side of the image eventually i could have done all these mountains way bigger i think they lacked a little bit of importance but i think i'm going to improve it eventually i was also thinking of importing all of the desks of the inside things all these inside things that a building has that an office building has like desk computers etc but eventually it was going to take a lot of time modeling and importing all these things so i eventually decided to do all these in photoshop i also added some lights since i was deciding myself for more of a nocturnal look i added some lights from the lumion library light library and these were just very bright lights what i wanted to do what the most important thing i think was that i wanted some very warm lights at the bottom near the street because that usually they usually have very warm lights and i wanted that to be the contrast between the warm lights of the street versus the cool lights of the sky and i also tried adding some light onto the inside of the building but they weren't being that relevant they weren't uh intense enough i don't know it just wasn't looking well so eventually i gave up on you know putting all those lights it was just having too much attention and one of the last things i did in lumion was uh you know populate the foreground with a lot of things since it was a park like a kind of public park i tried to make it much more imperfect it was very very perfect so i tried to put some twigs put some branches put some leaves rocks etc a person i think the person in a bike i put so it could look much more interesting and that person was going to make the contrast you know was was going to be the only human figure that was going to be in the image so i tried to put a lot of elements in the foreground and also i put a tree in the foreground so it can make that contrast between the foreground and the background which is the building after having rendered this the render time was about two to three hours was about an hour and a half i'm sorry and then i imported it into photoshop after this i only decided to work on the night image which i think was the the most important part the most important image and i also exported from lumion the raw shadows the material id the the light the alpha channel these are all options you can do from lumion so when you're in photoshop you have a better process you have a better selection everything is much faster and everything is just going to be much much better so i recommend you guys do that so from the beginning i knew that in photoshop i didn't have to do many things what i did have to do was a basic color correction which is really really important and adding lights to the main building because the main building obviously didn't look as well as you know as you would want so what i did was grab some textures some pictures from buildings from night buildings you guys can find this on google or you can always go to textures.com go to buildings and you will have the option that uh you know it will give you textures of different types of night buildings of office buildings so i imported five or four or five types of images with this and then this was the longest process in the whole image which was you know creating a very various uh sections various cuts of this and placing them on top of the image so the the essential thing that you have to do is learn how to cut which is you know using the marquee tool you can press m on your keyboard and select a special part of the image and then learning how to transform and adapt it to the perspective so if you press ctrl t on your keyboard and by pressing alt alt you can you know change the perspective of any type of texture that you want after you do this what you have to do is set that image mode the blending mode to screen so that will just make it blend much much better with the context with everything that that is around so that is basically the only thing i did and that was the most repetitive process these the majority of these textures of these images and the night buildings had a special type of framing so all the frames uh were you know kind of like square frames and i tried to coincide that with the framing of the existing building because it happened to me before that sometimes i just grabbed the whole texture image and i lay it on top of any building and what it did was it looked very generic it looked very photoshopped because the frame the size of the frames of the image weren't adjusted to the size of the frame of the buildings so what i recommend is that you adjust the size the scale to the scale of the building to the skill that the you're putting the texture on and one of the most important things as well is choosing images that are very different so if all the images look the same they have the same warm lighting then it's gonna look very kind of generic so i tried to use uh textures that had maybe warm lighting but also had some cool lighting had some shadows how also all maybe images that were very bright others that weren't as bright so that just gave it that randomness that you know real life buildings have they're sometimes the uh you know some people are late at night working and sometimes some aren't and that is perfect or some maybe some light bulb is you know it doesn't have the same intensity as the other one in the third floor above them and one of the most important things of this process was the color correction and for that color correction i use 3d luts so that is 3d luts for those of you that don't know 3d luts are a type of correction or a type of filter that has has a lot of corrections a lot of presets in them so it already has a type of color balance a type of hue saturation and has a type of brightness and contrast and you can download many of these from the internet some of them are for free some of them are not i downloaded these for free from a page they call a website called ludify so if you guys uh go to ludify.com you can find a free pack of 3d luts and basically i just imported these luts and what it does is it saves me a lot of time from color correcting the image from looking at the right tones and for this image it worked perfectly for some images it doesn't work that well because you know you're not going to always have the perfect sunset images sometimes you're going to have i don't know maybe mid-day images or maybe very overcast images before and in that moment this filter doesn't look that well it doesn't work that well this is more like a teal or an orange filter and it just works in very specific occasions and i'm glad it worked in this occasion and you don't want it to be as strong either because then it just looks like an instagram filter so i try to lower the opacity of the filter and obviously it's looking right now it's looking very dark so eventually i'm going to you know adjust the contrast and the brightness so it can look much better so after i did this three lut i went back on to importing more lights because that is basically the whole work that i had to do in this image in photoshop which is just import lights import lights and more lights like honestly i could have spent maybe two hours more doing this um but but i didn't you know i was just uh tired at the end but if the more time you you spend on it obviously the better it's going to look the more randomness you give to it the better it's going to look if i would have spent more much more time in it maybe i would have put many more lights on in the building and it would have looked maybe more random more natural right now it looks too render-ish maybe but i think it was a good result overall after i was tired of importing a lot of glass textures a lot of building textures what i did was i generated my own type of texture by mixing all the textures up so i you know imported some windows from from one side and a windows from another side and i created my own type of texture and then i imported that texture uh in like a big scale on the facades of the buildings in the background so that way i would have a much more random way of doing it and it was much much faster so obviously if you have a 3d model and you import the textures directly into your 3d model it's going to be much better if you can do this then i recommend you do this but since i wanted this to be you know a process that was more in lumion in photoshop then it wasn't you know my selection after you import this texture onto your building after you set the perspective onto it then you would want to you know erase some parts because it just looked too perfect sometimes all the buildings sometimes all the lights aren't aren't uh turned on so i just wanted to look i wanted to want it to look much more random so i turned off the build turned off the lights in one and left it uh left it on in some other ones and i also repeated this for the other facade of that back building i really like doing this some years ago this was just my hobby i should i would just you know come back from work for my full-time job and just practice on some random images because i really liked it and you know eventually i i you know i didn't practice as much and i just left it i concentrated on other things but i'm glad to be back on it because you know my skills my skills aren't that rusty i could have improved but i think i'm not that bad either so i'm kind of glad that i tried to practice and i want to practice some more in the future because i think if you can improve the skill then it can eventually look much better your your images can look much better and eventually your architecture presentations in general could improve much more one of the last steps that i did was use the camera raw filter so after after everything i merged all the layers into one layer and then i selected the camera raw filter and once you do this i just you know started doing very little adjustments like the contrast the saturation the dehaze button used was used to add a little bit of fog to it so that foggy look that you guys can see was done by using the camera raw filter and there's an option called dehaze and once you turn that option to the left it's going to give a little bit of mist to it a little bit of a kind of fog to it which looks a little bit mysterious i also adjusted the colors so it could uh you know it was this is was very random and subjective this isn't like very systemic so what i get what the tips that i give you aren't going to be appliable for applicable for everything but that was it that was it and after all you know after all these adjustments i thought i think i was happy with the result i know i could have spent much more time on it but i think that was the result i wanted and yeah i was very very happy all right so what did you guys think that you guys like the image i liked it a lot i know that i have many more corrections to make i know that there are some other places that i could take this image so i'm not really sure if but that's that's the way i'm going to leave it but for this video that was the final result there's just some things that i honestly don't know i'm not an expert in you know arc biz obviously so i don't know what would be the final point of this image or how i could improve it but i i'm just trying to see maybe if you guys have any advice on how to improve this image i would love to hear it and i would love to see in here if you guys are interested in seeing more videos like this if you guys are then i am super interested in doing them and yeah let me know in the comments thank you guys for watching and i will see you in the next video bye

Channel: Show It Better

Views: 132,396

Keywords: show it better, architecture tutorials, photoshop for architects, architecture videos, tutoriales de arquitectura

Id: oMltzYWxjS4

Length: 21min 57sec (1317 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 23 2021