We tried to do something different here, we sketched out an idea of three different street profiles and then we used SketchUp, Lumion 11, and a little bit of Photoshop to “bring the sketches to life”.
Look at how we made these diagrams with the steps below or watch the video tutorial here.
Download the project files for Lumion and Photoshop here: https://gum.co/UePQo
Final image
Sketching the idea
We wanted to create some street profiles for our diagrams, and we started sketching them in Photoshop with a graphic display tablet.
We created three different street profiles, we used for reference different street profiles you can find in different cities around the world, where you can see the predominance in car lanes, or bike lanes, or pedestrian paths.
Creating the 3D model in SketchUp
We opened SketchUp to start creating the diagrams that we had sketched before in photoshop. We created them but not in a very precise way.
We wanted to create a type of diagram where we had some type of mountains, some paths, and green areas. For this, we used the sandbox tool in SketchUp.
Lumion 11
Once you open Lumion 11, make sure that you have the live sync option and when you create the template, choose the create a design showcase template.
We started creating the basic materials, like the grass, the pedestrian pathways, the concrete, bike lane.
After changing the basic materials with some textures we downloaded which you can download also here.
We opened the camera settings and activated the orthographic effect on Lumion 11. In case you don’t have Lumion 11, or a version before Lumion 10, you can simulate this, by changing the field of view or the angle, to the one that gets closer to zero degrees.
We chose the fine detail vegetation when we were adding the vegetation to each of the diagrams. We know that we could have done better with the vegetation but it looks nice anyway right?
We tried to do include vegetation that you normally see in these street profiles.
Since this street profile had a Brazilian kind of style in the bridge, we tried to add some vegetation that was very specific to this place
We changed the texture of the road, Lumion doesn’t have that variety of textures, so we imported a texture we downloaded and resized it accordingly.
We modified some of the materials by adding a little bit of aging to them, to avoid that “perfect” look to them.
We started to add some important elements that would go accordingly with each street profile. We added a car here, and to be honest there wasn’t much to choose from.
Also, we added some street lamps, some benches, some dumpsters on the streets, and of course people that would be using each kind of path in each street diagram.
Finally, we adjusted the reflections, we had some glass verandas, and also we had streets with a few reflections.
Matching Orthographic Angle
We adjusted the angle, the pitch, and the orientation of the orthographic projection. Since we had a projection angle defined in the photoshop sketch, we activated the image overlay effect on Lumion to overlay the sketch on top of it.
Once we had the sketch on top of it, we tweaked the parameters of pitch and orientation until it almost matched exactly to the drawing that we made at the beginning.
We rendered the image and then imported the diagram to Photoshop, we added a color balance adjustment layer to make it a little bit warmer. We added the sketches that we did at the beginning to make a “before and after”
Final result
In the end, we went back to Lumion to animate it just a bit, to animate the cars, some birds, people. Watch the whole video tutorial below!
