How To Render a Perspective Section

We just love making tutorials for you guys in all types of formats, even though we haven’t asked you which one do you like better….

Anyways back to the tutorial, we also wanted to share that from some failures that we may have in life some awesome things can come out of them. This is an example, the Founder of Show It Better, Steven, was participating along with some colleagues in a competition, it didn’t go too well, but guess what? They were able to keep all of the material.

Stick along this tutorial, and you’ll see how they transformed their proposal into a cool image that you can maybe use for portfolio purposes or just to practice and keep upgrading your skills. You can also watch the video tutorial here.

DOWNLOAD THE PROJECT FILES HERE: https://gum.co/ZMrwo

Perspective Section Image

Render your section

Open your project in SketchUp, choose carefully which part you want as your main section image. If your SketchUp is acting up, take a look at this, it may be the processor in your computer setup.

With the help of the section plane tool, we found this perfect section, where you can basically tell what is going on with the building with all of the important details. In this case, you can see that the elevators are the first thing that draws the viewer’s attention.

Go to render settings, the section option should be enabled. Also! in the view, adjust it so it can in a perspective view. In this part, render some channels, like the material ID channel, the render ID channel, these channels would help you out when exporting to photoshop.

Once you’ve imported all of the files into photoshop, adjust them to be the same size. Your base render, the material channel layer, the lines layer. Also with the crop tool, increase the size of your canvas so the image won’t look so squished.

Adjusting section with Photoshop.

With our section here, we have some options to change to make it look more appealing. For example, using a layer mask, we used a soft brush, and we faded away the bottom edges of the section.

Here we were just experimenting with the colors of the section. We can’t have this image with a bunch of colors and our presentation board being just two colors. So this part of picking the right color is essential. Check out this article on how to change the color of anything in Photoshop here.

And it may just take time until you find the right color, you may even have to change the colors of everything, like the windows, the slabs. We even changed the color of the elevators thinking they were the main attraction.

With the hue/saturation option, we were changing the colors of the big windows in the side, but we just didn’t see it perfect.

After trying out different colors, we decided we’d go for a warmish color, and we left the windows to stand out. The elevators were drawing too much attention.

Since this section is in a university context, we started adding some people, the key is not to add people like in bikinis, or any other context that is not a university, so young people will be fine. And to avoid cutting off the background, watch this video and look at some sites where you can download free human cutoff for all of your projects.

Once you have all of the people set up, to add some shadows, you can press ctrl+j and then right click to flip vertically and lower down the opacity so it can look more like a reflection. To create shadows, using a soft black brush you can do this.

Hey and remember we have some free brushes for you guys, read this. With one of those brushes, we added some grass on the roof and also some people, yes don’t worry they are not going to run off the building lol.