We know that we always say that our tutorials are easy, but hear us out, this is the easiest by far lol. No, really, with clay render from SketchUp and then using Photoshop, you will see how we turned a render into a pleasing oblique image. Watch the tutorial video here.
If you don’t know what else to do to present your project a different way, take our steps and tricks to change a little bit. Make your projects look something like this.
1. Get clay render from SketchUp.
1.1 We took a render we had made in Revit and imported it to SketchUp. We are going to export the clay render, one with soft shadows and one with hard shadows.
1.2 Once you put it in axonometric view and parallel projection, then open your Vray settings, make sure your material override option has to be on. Then the size of the sunlight has to be a big size. Then render the image.
2. Import to Photoshop
2.1 Once you import all of the files to Photoshop, the clay file, the line pdf file, and the material ID file, resize them so they can have the same size.
2.2 With the line pdf layer, you can erase some lines that are not really relevant, we recommend using the mask option instead of erasing it forever.
2.3 After this, add an adjustment layer of black and white to eliminate the bluish tones.
3. Edit your image
3.1 We are going to start by coloring the top of the columns, to make the representation that the roof was cut off. We made them black, by using the brush tool (B).
3.2 The material ID layer, helps you when selecting specific parts of the image. In this case, the floor didn’t export, so we just used the lasso tool to select the floor to change the color.
3.3 There is this really cool website that can help you with finding the perfect color palette. So we went to Coolors, which is very easy to use, if you want a random color palette, just press your space bar and it will start to give you random colors. Once you’ve found the one you like, just click to copy. Or check out some existing color palettes here.
4. Add some extras
4.1 Creating a new layer, we are going to add some people to our image. Using the brush tool (B), we will choose about 3 to 4 different types of people, also don’t forget to scale them accordingly. If you want these brushes, we have them for free. Click here to download our Show It better brush pack.
4.2 It depends on your image and what you are representing, so adding the correct amount of people does matter.
4.3 With the hue/saturation option, you can change the color of the people. We also added a soft shadow with the brush tool (B). The shadow has to be accordingly where the sun is hitting the whole entire image.
5. Adding texture
5.1 After adding shadows, we created a new white layer, then we right-click to have the blending options. In the pattern overlay, it will give us different options of patterns to give to the layer. We wanted to emphasize the vertical of the image, and we chose a vertical line texture. Learn how to make seamless textures here.
5.2 Adding textures to avoid the image looking plain is a must. We got some textures from Spoon Graphics, and we started adding some texture, using the mode of multiply, so the shadows and important details can still remain the same.
6. Text
6.1 After cropping out the unnecessary white space of the image, we start to create the text with the color that the color generator page gave us. Don’t overdo it, the simpler the better. We also added some artistic 😉 vertical lines, to continue emphasizing the vertical of the image.
7. Color
7.1 Using the material ID layer, we decided to also paint the outside of the main image, with a color from the palette.
7.2 Once we painted the outside of the image, we noticed that the color of the text, we had to change it also. We also added more texture to the image, with a grain texture, we multiplicated it and then we merged all of the texture. Adding a motion blur to the grainy texture, to make it look vertical.
8. Secondary text
8.1 Don’t forget about the informative text, it does play a visual important role in the image. This will help to balance out the image. also with the best typography, depending on your project of course. Check out the best serif fonts for architects here. The lorem ipsum is our best friend in these cases haha.
9. Make it oblique
91. The final thing we did, was to make the image oblique. We learned this technique from Alex Hogrefe, where stretching out the image to make it look oblique. So in the image size, you can increase the height percent and then stretch it out.
Final oblique floor plan
For the final touch, we added the remaining of the floor plan to the sides, and we also changed the color a bit with ctrl+U.
Watch the video tutorial below!
