Explore the technique of creating an elevation in a PowerPoint presentation, keeping all elements to scale for a professional look. Understand the process of copying the elevation, saving it, and creatively designing it with your own selection of furniture styles, colored rendering, and a scale figure.
Key Insights
- The process of creating an elevation involves copying the elevation multiple times to create versions and then saving them as PDFs or JPEGs. A screenshot can also be used as a reference. The furniture is then used to create an elevation view.
- While creating an elevation, it's crucial to consider factors such as scale, removing backgrounds or cropping, and the furniture style. The chosen furnishings and colored rendering must resonate with the client's style.
- Furnishings such as sofas, chairs, and artwork must be found online, saved as images, and then brought into PowerPoint. Here, the images are layered onto the elevation, creating a rendering. For accuracy, the scale of each piece must align with the provided digital scale.
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Okay, we are now moving into the elevation. Now, it's important in the elevation rendering also for you to keep things to scale. We have the templates that I'll share in just a second.
You're going to do the exact same process. You're going to copy the elevation so you have an extra slide just in case. And you may copy it more than once so you have, you know, three versions of that elevation so you can play with it.
You're going to save the elevation. And you can also save them as a PDF or a JPEG and use that as a screenshot as well. Either way is fine.
The method I used in this lecture is you use the PowerPoint, you took a screenshot, and then you copied it over to the next slide. You are welcome to take the image itself, save it as a JPEG or a PDF, and use the same process, you know, utilizing another method that's similar. You're going to use the furniture and you're going to create an elevation view.
Now, you will notice that the elevation does not have the templates like I've shown here, and this was done intentionally. I'd like you to be creative with how you are going to design this elevation. So for the plan, I have given you a template.
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Plan is the overhead view. For the elevation, you are going to have to find and render the pieces of furniture on your own. So some things to consider.
Scale. Removing backgrounds or cropping. Furniture style.
What types of furniture do you want to use for your client and for your space? I would also like you to include a scale figure, and I'll talk about that in just a few minutes. And you have to make sure that whatever you do is appropriate for your client. Also, the colored rendering needs to match the client's style.
So just like the floor plan, we start with the base, right? The drawing of the elevation itself. And just like I've done for the floor plan, I've drawn the elevation and given you the scale so you can use this as the backdrop for the rendering itself. Now, you've got the elevation.
You've copied it and created your own slide using this template. You make sure that if you do copy this elevation, you have to copy the scale with it, right? Because if this changes, the scale needs to change with it, right? So I'd recommend trying not to change the template that we have here. I'm going to do a CTRL Z and just undo that.
So work with what you've got. Use the scale appropriately, and then you're going to go and you're going to find your own furniture. Now, here you can see that I went on and did an image search, and some key things to type in when you're looking for elevation renders, right? You could type in sofa elevation.
You may type in chair elevation, and you may go look at a variety of different pieces of furniture that are online, and you are welcome to use anything that you find. The whole idea of the elevation is that in the end, it's rendered in color. Now, if you choose to do this by hand and you want to use color pencils, you're welcome to.
This is just a strategy for doing it digitally. You're going to save a silhouette or a person, and you'll save all the elements that you know are going inside that elevation. Artwork, anything that could be a wall panel, you know, a chair with an ottoman, and the thing is you want to make sure that when you're doing these elevation rendering searches, when you're online and you're searching for these, I would suggest finding elevation of furniture that has a white background.
It just makes it easier for the rendering style. So, looking at a sofa front elevation, I'm going to select a sofa that has an elevation view, which is a view standing and looking at the sofa, and I'm going to make sure that that background is white. This will allow us to copy and paste into.
Same thing with artwork. For artwork, you may not type in artwork. You may type in what the artwork actually is.
So, if the artwork is a sunset, you may type in sunset under image search and find a sunset and then crop it so we can use that as a piece of artwork. So, just as a refresher, you've got the template. You've copied this template.
You have to go online, find elevation for various furnishings, sofa, chair, artwork, lamps, anything that you know that you're going to use in that final elevation. You're going to save these images, and you can save them onto your hard drive, open them up as a jpeg, and you can do the exact same process I said before. You could use the screenshot or the snipping tool, and we can bring those into the actual elevation.
So, again, this is my background, right? We know that, and we've saved these images. We've brought them into PowerPoint, and we've cropped them just like we've done with the furniture. Now, another trick is if you know that this piece of furniture is supposed to be in front of, let's say, a piece of artwork that's behind it, we can go here and we can right click and we can say bring to front or send to back.
This will make sure that this element is in the front. For the scale figure, we go in and we find a person. Ideally, a white background would be perfect, and we work with that as far as the scale figure, and we use the scale, right? If you know that you have a six-foot gentleman in your, a scale figure could be anywhere from five to six feet, and I'm open to how and what you use to create this, but if we took this silhouette or this person and turned them sideways, right, we could we could check the scale by just going here and saying rotate, and we say, okay, we want to make sure it's six feet, right? She's a little bit taller than six feet, so maybe we should bring her down a little bit.
All right, that's a tall female, but that's okay. So, we'll say six feet, and now we've got the size we want, and then we're going to go over here and just rotate again, and once it's rotated, you can position that scale figure in the drawing, and essentially, that's how you're going to create the elevation. You're going to use a series of layers.
Now, I would start from the back and work your way forward, so you may find an elevation of a color, just, you know, the color black or the color white, and you can use that inside the PowerPoint as your background. You may also say, no, like the previous image I shared with you with the project sample, you want a wall panel, and if you want that wall panel, you are welcome to go find that wall panel, crop it, and add it to the background, and then you slowly layer the additional pieces of furniture and artwork onto the elevation until you create the rendering of the elevation itself. Now, there are options in PowerPoint so that you can select the image and you can remove the background.
My version of PowerPoint does not have this. However, I know that it is possible. You can just do a quick YouTube search or a Google search.
You can remove the white background so that you don't have the white background on the object that you've selected for the final rendering. Now, if at the end, we've got our furniture that's laid out, right, it's scaled, we've used the templates or you've found your own and you've scaled the furniture as I've shared with you how to do today, and then you also have the elevation that you've used the background and you have essentially placed the furniture by using a series of copy and paste and using imagery. Now, if you say, I would like to draw the furniture on my own instead of using the furniture that you find online in Elevation, that is completely okay.
You may also say, I'd like to use Photoshop for this, and this is not a Photoshop lesson, of course, but you are welcome to use Photoshop if that's something that works well for you. This lesson is shared how to copy and crop furniture to add it to the elevation so you can get an elevation that is rendered in color, and in the end, everything is on the PowerPoint slide, right? So, using these strategies and using the templates that I've provided, you can ideally create a furniture layout scaled and an elevation rendering scaled in PowerPoint, and the elevation will be rendered and in color. Some things to consider when doing a search online for the elevations, you want to be sure that, again, like I said, it's on a white background.
The white background will just read really well on the PowerPoint sheet, on the PowerPoint slide. Now, again, you can also research how to remove that white background on whatever image that you save so that the white background does not exist and it's just the image of the sofa or the chair or whatever it is that you've selected. You can remove the background image, and I actually do have a quick tutorial here.
You can click on the image, and you can go to picture format, and under color, you can set transparent color, and setting transparent color, you select the white background, and that will allow you to remove the background or the white, or you can click on the image, you can select picture format, and you can select remove background. Those are two different strategies for removing the backgrounds. You can also use transparency settings in PowerPoint.
You can click on the image, you can select picture format, and you can adjust the transparency of each of these images. A couple things to keep in mind. Use high quality images, so when you're doing an image search, make sure, I would say, that the image, when you go to, let's say, a generic Google search, and you click on image search, you can go to tools, and you can go, and I would use either a medium or up resolution, so you can select tools and select medium resolution or large, but you may have trouble finding images that are at large resolution, so medium should be fine, and honestly, even at a low resolution, because this is a PowerPoint, you are likely to be okay.
Just make sure that the image doesn't show up blurry. Another key thing to keep in mind is use the crop settings that I shared in this lesson as well. Be sure to start with the plan and the elevation templates.
The PowerPoint itself is the template for your background for the floor plan and for the elevation, and the last tip is to be very careful with scale. Make sure that you know the size of the piece of furniture or the height of the piece of furniture and use the digital scale that I've provided so that you're scaling the furniture and the furnishings accurately. I look forward to seeing your final projects.
Thank you.
