RENDER A LUXURIOUS BUILDING EXTERIOR

Learn how to set up a detailed city scene and add details to improve your photorealism

- Aref Razavi

Architectural visualisations are complex projects to work on and it can take a considerable amount of knowledge, skill, and time to become proficient in this field. In this tutorial, I will attempt to help you speed up this process by sharing some of the skills and techniques that I have developed over my time doing this particular type of work.

Where some projects are reliant on a specific toolset, such as rigging or texture painting, a visual artist working in the field of architecture has to be skilled in many areas, from modeling and texturing to lighting, shader creation, UV editing, and much more. This makes producing results that wow an audience and please a client ever more difficult, but once you reach that goal it is wonderfully rewarding.

Setting the tone for an image can be a challenge, but there is plenty of room for experimentation and scope for delivering something that can be viewed as art as well as visual communication.

Many thanks to Arman Kadkhodaie for designing this building.

01 MODEL THE STREET

First draw a plane for the street. Make sure the dimensions are accurate and based on real world reference, as this is very important when it comes to archive images. For the best render results, you should use high-quality assets; Evermotion (Archmodels 211) and Quixel are great options for this.

02 ADD TREES AND FOLIAGE