The above image is a photo-montage I created of a proposed new development for Halliday West Ltd. to aid with planning.
The process started with me making a site visit, and taking photographs from a range of possible camera angles, for the client to choose from later.
In this case, the photo below was chosen to use as the backplate…
There were a couple of trees to both the left and right of the proposed building which would need to be removed from the photograph, and new portions of sky and background buildings added back in.
Working from the supplied elevation and plan drawings, I created an accurate 3D computer model of the proposed building. Then following the supplied external material schedule, added materials and textures to the model.
A virtual camera was added to the scene and the camera angle matched to the original, real view of the photographic backplate. Lighting was also added; with the virtual sun’s position matched to the time, date and location of the real sun in the photograph.
The CGI portion of the image was then rendered out to produce the image below…
I then post edited this render into the photograph; effectively ‘cutting out’ portions of the render to reveal the parts of the photo behind which I wanted to keep.
A few final tweaks to the colour and tone of the image to help match the CGI and photographic parts, and the final image is complete…
…because this image was going to be used for planning, there was no need to remove weeds in the pavement or tidy up cars etc. However this could have been done, had the image been required for marketing purposes.