Page 209 - Enhancing CAD Drawings with Photoshop

4386.book Page 193 Monday, November 15, 2004 3:27 PM

Chapter 6

Elevating the Elevation

Elevations are often used to give clients and the general public a first impression of what a structure
looks like. Although not as realistic as a perspective drawing or a 3D rendering, elevations convey the
essential qualities of proportion and scale.
By enhancing elevations with Photoshop, you increase their effectiveness as a means of graphical
communication and thereby transfer greater design understanding to a wide audience. Usually no
extra work is required to produce the elevation drawings themselves. Because they are a required ele-
ment of a design development drawing set, you probably have to draw them anyway.
You can save a lot of time by enhancing elevations with Photoshop as compared with making
photo-realistic 3D renderings in a program such as Autodesk VIZ. Another timesaving alternative is
compositing image layers in Photoshop from a simple 3D model made in VIZ (see Chapter 7, “Creative
Compositing”).
In this chapter you will be exposed to many elevation enhancement techniques, including the
following:
◆ Converting AutoCAD Drawings
◆ Simulating Texture

◆ Casting Shadows
◆ Faking Reflection and Refraction
◆ Adding Entourage

Converting AutoCAD Drawings

AutoCAD elevations are line drawings that often include line thickness (called line weight in AutoCAD)
as another graphical dimension. Traditionally, elevations convey the outlines of a structure’s major
features, and line weight emphasizes depth and the relative importance of the objects shown.
Elevation layers in AutoCAD are usually numbered sequentially (Elev-1, Elev-2, and so on), thus
identifying their line thickness; for example, progressive layer numbers might refer to thinner lines.
In contrast, plan layers refer to the building systems to which the lines belong (for example, the layer
A-wall represents an architectural wall).
Line thickness information is not needed when you convert AutoCAD drawings, because you will
be illustrating the elevation’s depth with more expressive tools available in Photoshop: texture, shadow,
and reflection. Therefore, there is usually no benefit in preserving the layer structure with elevations
when converting CAD drawings to images as you did in the previous chapter.