POST-PRODUCTION | WORKFLOW

Now for the belated breakdown of the post-production workflow!

Process sheet for the post-production, showing diagrammatically the basic workflow I utilised

This diagrammatic sheet above that I created as one of my deliverables is probably the easiest way to illustrate how I went about post-production, but I’ll provide some extra explanation below.

The basic process was heavily based around making as much use of the render layers as possible, with the WireColour layer used for masking for each section. The RawReflection layer I used a lot, though most noticeably for the window reflections. It was also used noticeably on the paving to make it appearance more interesting, as well as on the metal roofs to make them more noticeably metallic. ExtraTex_dirty was used both as a general overlay at the top of the basic render group (I organised the PSD into groups for each stage) so that it would affect everything – it did wonders in making the edges stand out – and as a selective overlay on the metal roofs to increase the visibility of the roof tiles.

The other noticeable addition was on the grass – I never intended to use the rendered grass texture, that was always just a placeholder – where I masked in a photograph of graph that I used, funnily enough, to make the grass on the housing visualisation. I then used the basic grass brush along the edges of the mask to make it appear more realistic with blades of grass visible at the sides and hey presto. (I do need to use a different image next time around though, can’t keep using the same source for things – it’ll be really noticeable in my pieces otherwise).

Once I was pretty happy with the general appearance of the image, I used Shift-Ctrl-Alt-E to create a copy of the resulting image on a new layer, then made colour adjusts with levels, curves and finally a first pass with the wonderful Camera Raw Filter – which gives you so much control over the look of your image.

After that I photobashed in a city/hills background (photo references for which can be found at the bottom of this post), before adding a relatively subtle Depth of Field effect with the Lens Blur filter. Then another Camera Raw Pass, before yet another Cam Raw Pass, and then adding people (again, references at the bottom) to the visualisation to both illustrate scale and show the area in use.

It ended up being a very effective workflow as I was able to get the post-production done in one working day, and get what I feel is a pretty good result out of it.

With the post-production process detailed, next we’ll take a look at some of the deliverables – namely the model and render layers sheets!

City background photobashed from a combination of these images: