Discover how to create breathtaking exterior renderings, starting with the basics such as choosing the best view, and then moving on to more advanced techniques such as adjusting the phase settings and exposure to create the perfect blend of interior and exterior lighting. The article emphasizes on the value of experiment and iteration to achieve stunning results in architectural rendering.
Key Insights
- The creation of an exterior rendering starts by selecting an appropriate view. This can be achieved by navigating through the virtual space using the navigation wheel and adjusting the camera perspective.
- The rendering's settings are critical to achieving the desired end result. This includes the choice of lighting (exterior sun only vs exterior sun and artificial), phase settings, exposure balance, and color temperature. These factors can significantly impact how the rendering appears, influencing the perception of both the interior and exterior of the building.
- Experimentation plays a crucial role in creating a successful exterior rendering. The process often involves a series of iterations and adjustments to find the perfect balance between various settings. The ability to reset settings to default allows for a flexible approach to experimentation.
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For exterior rendering, we're going to do exactly the same thing we did for the interior. So let's go to our new level one plan, and what we want to do is create a view that's going to highlight our new addition. So I'm going to go to my view tab, 3D view, camera, and then I'll just kind of pick a point, and I clicked somewhere about here, and just grab a decent perspective, and let's see what we come up with.
So this is not a great side of the building to show with the rendering here, so I'm going to kind of clip that in a bit, and this one here. And what I could do now is I really wish I would have been pointing, you know, from this angle or so, and so what I could do is I could grab the wheel here, which is our navigation wheel, and I can kind of walk it over. If I click that walk option, I could start to walk, and then moving around, and then turning towards the building, and then kind of backing it out and moving it around to get a view that I think is going to be a little bit more pleasant.
Now, just like all the other things we've been working on, primarily in these lessons here, you know, what a good rendering view is clearly a subjective thing, and so if, you know, you wanted to have more of a straight-on shot or something in there, I am totally open to seeing what you guys come up with, because that makes this a lot more fun, and just instead of just seeing everybody do the same thing. So please feel free to experiment within reason here. So the exterior ones, you're going to be pleasantly surprised, because these are going to go a lot simpler than the interior ones did.
If I were to go in and change my rendering settings, so I'm going to pop open that dialog again, it says exterior sun only, and we might as well just roll with it, and I'm going to save, because we always save before we run our rendering here, and I'll hit render, and let's see what we come up with. We can see that it has rendered, and it was pretty quick, like I promised, but we're seeing some interesting things here. When you look at the existing, it's just rendering as a gray box, and that's because the phase settings here are set to previous plus new, and so I'm going to click show the model here.
If I change this from previous plus new to show complete, what it'll do now is it'll show everything all as one, and so when I go to render, now it'll render the entire thing like it was all just one piece all together, and that tends to look better for a rendering view, unless you're specifically trying to highlight what's existing in new, and in this case we just want to have a nice final rendering, and so you can see that looks much better, and we've got it set to exterior sun only. If we change that to exterior sun and artificial, what it'll do is it'll actually turn on the lights on the interior, and we might see a little bit of those too. So I'm going to go back to show the model, and let's go ahead and do one more draft, and then we'll get ready to do the final rendering, and so not bad.
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It brightened it up a little bit on the inside, but not too much, and a lot of that has to do with just overall exposure. If we had it bright enough to the point where you could see the interior rendering, it's just going to blow out the exterior like you saw here. So you can see I kind of brought it back a little bit, and it's just way too bright, and so you got to find that fine line with your interior as well as with your exterior.
So I'm going to bring it, I think it was at 14. That was a little bit too dark, so maybe just a little bit down a bit. The white is pretty pronounced, but I think we can darken up some of the highlights, which should help, and then we can make the shadows a little bit darker too, and so you can find that sort of fine line between each of these settings to get to something that you like, and I've gone way off the deep end here, so I'll reset it to default, and then go from there, and so it's great because you always have that option to kind of bring you back home to something normal.
In this case, the color temperature looks a little warm to me, so I think cooling it up a bit would do us some good, but again, that's totally up to you. I encourage you to experiment with these settings, and so what we'll do now is just do that final rendering on this one, and then we can start getting ready to put this whole project together on some sheets.
