Its been a while since i put together an architectural render, so i thought to myself ‘Steve, you should really get some practice in’. So while my better half is on a night shift i decided to put this together.

Now, its not perfect, as this is more a practice piece and experiment than a clients work, but to build the model, render and finish via image editing this took about 7 hours in total. And to be pretty honest, i wasn’t in much of a rush. But still, i think thats a pretty respectable time.

The model is loosely based off of the Stradthaus building in Hackney, which is a personal favourite of mine. So much so it will more than likely feature quite heavily in my Hons dissertation. For anyone interested, the Stradhaus is the tallest timber building in the UK and is a very interesting construction when looked at from not only an aesthetic view point but also an engineering one too.

Heres the photo i used as the basic back/foreground

So heres how it was done, first i build a pretty simple rough and ready model in sketchup.  Apart from the ground each floor is an identical component simply rotated to provide the desired layout.

From there i simply added a few very basic colours, notice i haven’t added any textures, this could have added a little extra detail but on a model like this i didn’t feel it was necessary. Although a little superfluous, there is one material which is used for the windows.

Now the sketch up model is ready for a speedy render (+alpha render) in indigo RT. Heres the result.

This is where i now import everything into my image editing software. Up till now only 2 or so hours have gone by, editing the image into something useful takes by far the longest amount of time. And there you have it, the ‘finished’ piece.

If you would like a break down of any particular techniques or a run through of what i get up to in the image editing software please leave a comment below or drop me an email, i would be glad to help out (thats if i can), and on the flip of that, i would appreciate any critique, so if this is your bread and butter i would love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading!