Moe Amaya - Rendering Presentation (MIT Architecture - Student Talks 1)

Hi everyone, my name is Mo. I'm an M.Arch and Options 1. So Gallo asked me to come show you sort of my— elaborate on my process of digital sketching. And the idea for me is really about reincorporating the concept of the brush as opposed to sort of the pencil, or analogy sort of Rhino versus A trace paper sketch. And also I realized the difficulty in actually watching someone produce a tutorial visually, so if anyone is still interested, there's a sort of outline here on this handout. So part of the process for me for sketching visually is actually loosening up. Interestingly, I always sort of suggest to people to have a glass of wine. So turn on some music, because seriously, most of this process uses the Photoshop brush really heavily. So this is from earlier in the semester. My design partner and I sort of stayed up really late at night and went through— iterated through a bunch of ideas on trace paper and built quick models. And we wanted to have something in the morning to produce. So I spent about a half hour making this image. And this is sort of the base. The way I'm describing this is we have a really quick, crude 3D rendered model, and then you have a sort of site that I composed. I can quickly just sort of show this whole site, the process of this. So we knew we wanted an urban site, but we wanted it to be a sort of smaller street. So I just started building up the image with random Google Images and Flickr until we sort of got the condition that we were looking for. And then this is where we started out. So for me, I mean, this is— this is really not describing. It's not sort of interesting looking. So the first step in order to begin incorporating the disparate elements is really fitting in the shadows and highlights. So the simplest step is you're actually going to go ahead and just create a brand new layer. You're going to take the brush tool, set it to black, and then set your opacity down to 5 or 10%, and then you're literally just going to start painting it on. Where you sort of— I mean, I think we all understand enough about drawing and imagery to figure out where most of the shadows are. So you'll begin creating these shadows here. So this object casts down on these trees. tracks that originally were lit correctly. This bridge, now that it's here, it'll start to cast shadows here on this— these buses and the cars that are going underneath the underpass. And another issue a lot of times that you'll have with rendering and site images is that the connection is really harsh. So like here you can see that there's still a little bit of a highlight. So there's going to be always an ambient shadow at those connections. So that's sort of the first step in order to begin incorporating the entire image together. Similarly, you can do the same thing with highlights. In this case, I wanted to show that these cars aren't going into a cave, that there's actually light beyond the rest of the city. Sort of the next step is this— is color grading, or the idea of toning out and sort of mediating all the images together, because in this image, clearly this is oversaturated, this is a different tone. These all have funny colors. So what I do is I pick an image. I have a sort of library of images that I'm trying to sort of evoke a certain emotion. And in this case, I know that our— this image has an urban scene below here, and I want to keep that sort of busy and lively. So what I do is I actually just take this. Oops. Now just paste it in, stretch it to the size of the canvas, then set its overlay to color, and then begin to bring back some of the original colors by lowering the opacity back down. So what it does is it begins to balance out all the colors. The other thing you can do is if you're getting some harshness in the image is to actually blur it. So you can see here on this layer, that's how I brought out the color back up. So now the image is sort of flattened, but it's incorporated and sort of seamless. The next step I do is use people, but actually keep the people up and over at the top of this layer so that they're contrasted and they pop out, because a lot of times what you're trying to trying do is to describe is this interaction of the people in the space. A quick step that I use actually is to just take an image that already exists that has lots of people in it and then just erase the background. So what you have here is all these people exist already in— so, and what you do is you just mask out and you leave the people in there. So that's a 5-minute process to get 5, 6, 10 people in there. But really this project is about the space So I do want to begin to individuate the people that are part of that scene. So I'll actually put these people in there by hand still. All right, so, and then the last step is when you step back and look at the image, it's still a sort of total scene that there's nothing really that's drawing your eye or nothing to focus on. So what I'll do is I'll set up another couple of layers that begin to draw your eye towards the object that I want to begin talking about. So the first thing is, this is sort of the object that I'm describing, and what we'll do is we'll add some contrast by adding some layers and then bringing up some of the highlights so it begins to pop out of the rest of the scene. The next step is there's a lot of grass down below here that really isn't part of what we're trying to evoke, so I'll begin to shadow out, add another layer of shadow, sort of like I did with the original shadows. So you're just adding layers of shadows? And that draws your eye upward, back up into the scene. And the last step is, because I drew in all those shadows, we want to give a sort of hint or a highlight of where the sun is, so that— and also there's a lot of building here that sort of is unnecessary, and we can begin to blow out the scene on the left. So overall what it begins to do is it focuses your eye and frames this part of the scene, sort of where the people are, where the buses are. Are and where this transition is going to be. And that's the process. So it's a 30-minute process essentially, and we quickly have an image that we can sit there and talk about the following morning. That's it.