Learn how to create depth in your architectural designs using line weight, shadowing, and color adjustments. This guide will walk you through the process of manipulating visual styles and graphic display options to achieve a more realistic, three-dimensional look.
Key Insights
- Creating depth in architectural graphics involves a combination of techniques, including adjusting shadows and line weight. Shadows give a sense of three-dimensionality, while line weight helps distinguish elements in the foreground from those in the background.
- Using the graphic display options and visual styles, you can adjust silhouettes and ambient shadows to impart a more realistic look to your designs. Silhouettes with wide lines outline the elements, and ambient shadows offer a gradient, softening edges and creating a more natural appearance.
- The lighting and color settings can significantly impact the final look of the design. Adjusting the sun and shadow settings can create a more subtle look, while tweaking the color of materials, like glass, can make the design more visually appealing. However, these adjustments are subjective and should be done based on personal preference.
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The next graphics change that we're going to make here is we're going to go ahead and look at how we can create some depth in this plan. And so we know that this wall here is much further back than this guy, but it's really hard to tell because there's no line weight or shadow or anything that's determining that. So the first thing I'll do is I'm going to go ahead and turn on my shadows.
And that's this button right here. Just by toggling it on, you can see it gives us a nice shadow here and creates some of the depth that we're looking for. This is only one of the things that we'll do.
The next one is we're going to go into our Visual Styles and then our Graphic Display Options. And through here, what we can do is we can actually adjust a couple of things. So the first one that I want to do is I'm going to set the silhouettes to be wide lines, and that'll give me some depth because it'll give me an outline on all of these elements here.
And line weight is typically good in these situations. The next one I'll do is I'll turn on my ambient shadows because that'll give me more of a gradient with the shadows and it'll give it a more realistic look. And let's go ahead and hit OK and see what those two changes have done to our view.
And so you can see we now have a bold outline around the building. And then when you look at the shadows here, you can see that they're much softer on the edges, right? And then there's more of a gradient coming through instead of it just being a hard line. Now, when I look at the shadows, I think the lighting's a little bit too harsh.
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We can adjust that in the same dialog. If I go back here, then Graphic Display Options, I can go into the Lighting tab and I can adjust the Sun and Shadow settings. And so I can adjust ambient light to be a little bit brighter.
I could maybe bring down the sun and I definitely want to bring down the shadows a little bit. So instead of going back and forth between these two, I can hit apply and you can see that starts to make a really big difference in the way this looks. If you wanted it to be a little brighter, you can start turning up the sun setting or turning down the shadow setting and you can start to get a more subtle look with the shadows.
And this is all very subjective. I think everybody's going to have kind of their own opinion, but it's good to have the tools so that you can make these adjustments yourself. Now, as far as with the sun direction, that can be adjusted in this Sun Settings section to where you can adjust it to be from top right, top left, single day, multi-day, or a still with a specific time and day.
And I think we're going to be okay with these settings here. We'll leave it as is. Now with those changes, I didn't see really a big improvement in the color of the glass.
It actually may have gotten worse. We're going to adjust those still and see if we can make it look a little bit better. So I'm going to hit okay here.
And then we're going to go into, we'll pick one of these curtain panels because they're all going to be the same material. And if I hit edit type, you can see the material is set to glass here. And all I have to do is adjust that color that we're seeing on the glass and it should change it on all these.
If I pick into that section, just like before when we changed the material on some of those wall and floor types, we can go in and we can adjust this material glass here to have a different shaded appearance as what we're seeing here. So there's chances that if we go into this Appearance tab, you can kind of see that the glass is going to look sort of clear like that. And so you might have some luck where if you use this Use Render Appearance, it'll give you something that's worth using.
In this case, that's pretty bland. It doesn't have much of a shade to it. So I'd prefer to take this one and then adjust it a bit.
And you can see, we can give it a little bit of color. I think I want it to be just a little bit more blue so that we can still see it. And this is again, is a subjective change.
And so you can use your personal preference here, but I'm just tweaking it to look a little bit better. So I'll hit OK. It'll take a couple OKs here to get out of it completely.
And you can see that's a little bit too on the white side. We'll just go back into that. Instead of going through the Edit Type dialog, you can also go to Manage Materials and that does the exact same thing.
So I can go in here and it was clear that we needed maybe a more saturated color to get it to where we want. And so I'll go somewhere in between there and hit OK. And this is starting to look a little bit better.
And so you'll want to just play with that until you get a better color. I'm going to go a little darker here and see if we get something that that's a little more presentable. And so a little too dark and that's pretty common to go back and forth on these, but you'll see as you kind of get through it that finding it does take a little bit of guess and check to find the right color.
And so this will work fine for our purposes here. And so you can see just a few changes were able to adjust our elevation to have some good graphics to it.
