, jk. Learn how to take a 3d model from SketchUp and just pimp it out, and make the urban study in Photoshop, so it can look something like this.
1. Get your render ready
1.1 If you have your 3d model in SketchUp, set up a top view of it. With your Vray editor, make it only 1 color with very soft shadows. Activate your render elements to export it in a very good resolution.
1.2 In SketchUp, export the base images that you’ll be working with, the clay render image, the line file in pdf, and the material ID image. Import all of these to Photoshop and make sure they are the same size
2. Adjust your site image
2.1 Once you have all of the layers, start by making some changes. In this image we wanted the streets to stand out, so we made them in a different color, a darker gray. With the render ID, choose only the streets, create a new layer and paint it.
2.2 The material ID layer, will help you out to select in a better way what you want to stand out. Here we selected the urban proposal.
2.2 The material ID layer, will help you out to select in a better way what you want to stand out. Here we selected the urban proposal.
2.4 This is a different way of adding trees to our site. With the brush tool (B), you can just make it a certain size, alternate and with one color, make your dots where the trees would go.
2.5 Once you have all of your trees in place, in that layer, go to the fill option and turn it down to zero, then go to your blending options, then click on drop shadow. You will see that the trees will get that 3d look.
2.6 To give somewhat of a visual texture to this site, we are going to use also the material ID layer to choose some houses and make them darker.
2.7 We are going to do the same thing with the cars, don’t stress out if you don’t have any images or car brushes. We made cars just with a square brush, the same process as the trees. Copy and paste them, obviously change the sizes. Go to blending options and add some drop shadow.
3. Urban Site Study
3.1 Select the pen tool and start drawing the street flows. Draw with the Pen tool, to create the street paths that the people would take in the urban proposal.
3.2 Once you have all of these lines, merge them, duplicate them and go to blur > gaussian blur, and you will see this nice glow. Of course, you can choose your own color.
3.2 We also created another layer, to make a different urban study category. In this case, we wanted to show the access to the plazas in our urban proposal. You can also add some text with the title. Make sure that you make all of these analyses in different colors.
3.3 Remember these urban studies are going to be side by side, so the color palette is very important. We created another urban layer of analysis, the green area. You can play around with the blending options, maybe use the multiply option so the textures can stay the same but with the color.
4. Explore
4.1 Just explore, yup. We know that we may have limited time to work on our projects, but you never know what can come out when exploring. Here we just decided to explore a little bit more, we played around with the hue/saturation of our image, just to see what looked best.
How do you do your Urban Site Studies?
Check out the YouTube video tutorial on how to make these analisis down below!
