Understanding Elevations, Sections, and Renderings for Visualizing Interior Design Projects

Let's get started. Now as we move through, on top of floor plans, you'll be drawing what are called elevations and sections.

We'll start with elevations. Now you have to think of elevation as a two-dimensional view, and you will practice this. We're going to do an elevation rendering for your final project, so stay tuned.

Elevations reveal heights of ceilings, furniture heights, right, and other elements that are inside. So imagine the floor plan is your, if you were floating above the space, looking down, that would be the view of a floor plan. Now imagine you're standing in the kitchen, looking straight at the cabinets in the kitchen, and that wall that you see with all those details on that wall, that essentially creates the elevation.

So the drawing of the elevation is looking at the vertical nature of the space, whereas the floor plan is looking at more of the horizontal and overhead nature of the space. And we'll typically include what we call a scale figure in these drawings, and this is basically a person, so we understand how large and how small things are. Now when you create a section, you're essentially cutting through the building.

You have to imagine a big saw cutting through the middle of the building, going from top to bottom, and what would you see if you cut through the building? Well, part of what you're going to see is the elevation that we just talked about, right? If I cut, if I slice the building in half from top to bottom, I'm now looking at the inside of a building, and I'm looking at maybe that kitchen view, but I'm also starting to see the wall thicknesses, the ceiling thicknesses, and so the difference between a section and an elevation is the section actually shows what the interior and the structure is made of, right? And it may just be a graphic representation. I'll show an example of that in just a second. And again, inside these sections are elevations, and I think when you visually see this, it will make a lot more sense.

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But just understand that elevations and sections work very closely together. The elevation is that two-dimensional view straight on, standing and looking at a particular surface like a wall, and the section is imagining cutting through that entire floor, ceiling, walls, and then what would you see in that view? And I'll share with you some examples of what this looks like in just a second, so bear with me. And again, just like floor plans, conceptual design, schematic design, design development, all of these phases, you'll be drawing elevations and sections.

So let's look at a couple samples. Let's look at what a typical interior elevation might look and feel like. So here we see an interior elevation.

What do we see? Well, we see the furniture, obviously. We see the height of the furniture. So here we can understand, okay, the height of the furniture is, you know, maybe it's two or three feet off the ground.

We see the door that goes to the library, right? And we see the height of that door, and the door's called out to be eight foot tall, right? We also see the crown molding on the top of the elevation, which is on the very upper portion of that elevation. And we see other elements, like chairs. We see the artwork that's on the wall.

So you have to imagine that an elevation is a view of essentially you standing and looking at the wall, any different wall, inside the space itself. Now each elevation is different, right? If I look at this elevation, which goes towards the library, that's going to be very different if I turn around and I'm looking at, let's say, a kitchen elevation, right? But the importance of elevation, of the elevations, is so we can start to get an idea of what we want to do with the design of the interior. Now I would say this is schematic in nature, because it's kind of a loose drawing, right? You could see the furnishings are kind of sketched out.

And this may change. You may have two or three different variations of how you could design this elevation. Variation one is we've got two chairs, symmetrical.

We talked about that in a previous lesson. We want a very kind of traditional design in this particular home. And another option may be completely modern and asymmetrical.

And the point of the elevation is so that we can say, hey Mr. Client or Mrs. Client, what is it that you're drawn to? What are you attracted to? And which one of these styles works best for you? So as you're designing in these various phases, it's important to experiment with a variety of different ways to approach the design. This elevation could be designed a hundred ways, right? Now if we look at a section, right, as I mentioned earlier, you can see, yes, there are elevations in this section. The difference between the elevation and this section view that you're looking at here is that the section is a cut through the entire building, including the floor.

We see the floor, we see the roof, or the floor of the second floor, and we see the roof above that. And we see the curved roof structure above that. So that dark line represents the thickness of the floor, the thickness of the ceiling, and the thickness of the walls.

And where you don't see dark, where you see it's kind of light gray, it's representing where windows or maybe light would come through. So an elevation is typically a single shot view inside a room, right? A section will cut through the entire building. And again, for this class, we're going to do an elevation, and we're going to design it for our clients based off of your last assignment.

So hopefully this helps clear up the difference between a building section and an elevation. Now, building sections and elevations are not the only tools that we use as interior designers. We use what's called rendering.

Now, renderings are drawing that represent what the final design could potentially look like, right? So these are typically in color, they show furnishings, they show scale figures, which is people, they show lighting elements, and they show other realistic representations of what's happening inside the space. And this can allow the client to really have an understanding of how and what the space is going to look like. So presenting to the client through each phase, there may be a rough schematic rendering in phase one, schematic design, and then once you get to design development, the rendering starts to apply, you know, the actual materials that are inside the space and a little bit more detail.

In the conceptual and schematic design phase, the goal is for the client to sign off on the design style, right? You don't want to make it to construction documents and not know what the concept or what the design of the building is supposed to be, right? So that's why it's so important that during the schematic phase, you're going through these options, and you may state that in your contract, we're going to go through, you know, five or six different design options with the fees that I'm charging you for this particular project, and the client knows that it's going to change, and you're going to go through, you know, some different what we call iterations or different variations. Now the design development presentation typically starts to have more details, right? Furniture, materials, specifications, and then obviously as you get into the construction document drawings, the contractor is going to use those renderings to help them understand what is actually going to be built in the space itself, and it's important for the client to sign off on each of these phases as you move forward in the project development. Now here's an example of a rendering, and this is a digital rendering.

So this was done with a computer. Now there are a variety of programs out there that do digital rendering. The wonderful thing is you can actually do a rendering in PowerPoint, and I'm going to share that with you guys in a couple lessons.

This particular software, it uses a combination of Revit and SketchUp along with a software called Lumion, L-U-M-I-O-N, and what Lumion does is it takes the 3D model that you've drawn and it adds the beautiful layers to finish it off. So you have to imagine the walls, the ceiling, the windows, all of that is built up in a drawing, in a model, and then that is brought into a program, and that software you can apply materials, you can apply texture, you can see where the sunlight is coming from, and I think that's a key aspect that we have to understand as designers, is that the rendering gives us a chance to see how and what the space is actually going to look like. And the software that's out there these days is so impressive.

We can study the sun angles, and we can look at what this living room space would look like at 12 p.m. Versus 6 p.m., right, or at sunrise at 6 in the morning, and we can study how the light is coming into the space so the client has an idea of what they're going to, what's going to be designed for them before the project is even built. And nowadays renderings can be so lifelike and so realistic that sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between an interior rendering and the real project itself. And obviously the goal is for us to show the client what their final result is going to look like, and also so that you know it works, right? If you have a rendering, and it's well laid out, and it's well designed, the client has a very good understanding.

And here's the important thing to note with all of these various drawing techniques that I'm sharing with you today, is that they all work together, right? If you stripped this and only looked from the top down, you would have a floor plan. If you looked at just the circular window straight on, you would have an elevation. If you cut the building from top to bottom, you would have your section.

And now we're looking at the interior rendering. So all of those drawings work together to create the design style that you're going for, or the design functionality that you're going for. So it's important to understand that each of these are important.

And when I draw with clients, I may, once I change the section, I also change the elevation, update the rendering, and then you go back and you do it all over again. If you change an elevation, you're essentially affecting all the different drawings that come together to create the project itself. So it's important for you to be very involved through that process.

Here's another example of an interior rendering that was computer generated. There are also, you can use tools like Adobe Photoshop to help with rendering. LightScape, Lightroom, there's all sorts of great programs out there that allow interior designers to render.

And I even think there's some free programs out there that allow you to kind of play with lighting and spatial features. And again, these days, renderings are such a key aspect of really showing the reality of the space. And once you have a rendering that the client approves, the rest of the process becomes a little bit easier because we know what the end goal is, right? We know what materials we're going to use.

We know where the materials and where the furnishings and where the ceiling heights are, and we have everything dialed in, right? So this is something to keep in mind. Great. Let's take a break and we'll cover materials and mood boards in our next video.