So here’s the third piece from my series of architectural-illustrations-as-old-paperback-covers. Sorry, there are likely to be at least a couple more, for interiors and roof.
As opposed to being outright ray-traced Rhino renders, these things are composed of Rhino viewport captures layered together in Photoshop and pretty much painted- or collaged-over to to get ye-old-drugstore-find look. The end result pretty much obscures the rather unsubtle shading and texturing characteristic of direct viewport grabs, and it’s much faster than using any traditional Rhino render. I just need a general shadow scheme and colors for masking: everything else is taken care of by me-and-my-stylus.
Here’s the sort of viewport capture I extract to layer up and overpaint:
(This is a custom “false color” viewport display mode destined to produce masks in Photoshop.)
(This is a customized viewport display mode I whipped up, something like Arctic but with materials.)
(Rendered Display Mode, with transparent materials visible in the model)
(…the same as above, but with all items having transparent materials turned off, no change in lighting or shadow settings)
I’ve noticed some odd issues with Viewport Captures that make this technique more painful that it should be. Under some circumstances, the Capture Viewport to File tool doesn’t seem to capture what is on the screen. This seems to have something to do with the resolution of the capture, as the first cause: I generally want the smallest dimension of a capture to be quite large, 5K or 6K pixels, so that I can shrink the image down in Photoshop to minimize the jaggies caused by the limitations of Rhino’s on-screen antialiasing. But if I grab a viewport with shadows, and I specify a pixel height for the capture over 4K, the shadows will not capture properly. Some parts of the shadows will not show at all (it is falling on an active but shadow-only Ground Plane), or there may be a much lighter “chunk” in it. Even at 4K pixels in height, which is what you see above, the shadow in the Rendered viewport I used with this image is captured as much lighter than what I want and than what I see on my screen…unless I turn off or hide every object in the model that has a transparent or translucent material applied, either by layer or to the object alone. It’s frustrating…no amount of playing with Shadows category in the Display Options settings changes the issue. I have to fix it in Photoshop.
Incidentally, this is a 145mb Rhino file, which is generally not a problematic size for my current Windows setup. I will be upgrading the office computer in the next week (to beat the oncoming “tariff storm” that is expected to double or triple the cost of consumer electronics like computers in the US), so I will soon have a chance to test to see if a more capable graphics card or top-line Ryzen cpu improves the process, versus my 2022 system.
