Creating site 3D Diagram for your architectural board

Hi all! This will be my 2nd post regarding #architecture and my 1st tutorial post. Unfortunately, I have to remove the image of my 1st blog due to legal reasons and also will not post any follow up on that.

So back to the topic Diagrams, as an architecture student you will probably be introduced to a few software to help you in your studies. Some of those are the autodesk suites, photoshop and etc., for now we will be focusing more on sketchup and photoshop.

Initially we were taught to put all the things that we learned from the given project site in one diagram. For beginner this is acceptable. However, as you progress in your studies or work it will look like a cluttered piece of drawing and will be difficult to understand because of having too much information in a single diagram. So what we do, is to separate those information into a few diagrams.

We will be using a housing project on this topic as an example and producing 4 diagrams. For me, it's better to do 3 to 4 site diagrams to aid in explaining how you planned the site because diagrams are just aids and we do not want it to take up a lot of board space. First, we group the information in relation to each other. For example, we group into one diagram the ff:

• vehicular path, parking location, cycling path and ingress and egress (which is the easiest).

Next is the

• pedestrian access and route (which is accessible by PWD = Persons with Disabilities) and bus stop.

For the next group, we can provide

• all the site amenities location such as playground, fitness station, parks and commercial space.

And last, is

• identifying the prime units, views and open spaces.

Note: you can arrange which info should be on the group based on what the project brief requires or what you as the designer wants to highlight in the design.

Now on to #SketchUp!!

First, do the massing of the site. Once done, save a scene which is similar to how you orientate the site plan on your board so that it's easier for the reader to relate it to the site and understand (True north is commonly used).

Upon finalizing the view, we then model up those site information you have grouped and want to show on the board. Below is the model of the diagram for the vehicular path, parking and etc.

Notice on the above image that it was rendered with shadows on but without the building line or edges on the model (can be done by turning off the edges, endpoints, etc on the SketchUp styles menu). Shadows give the reader a feel of the buildings relationship to one another. Also we purposely turn off the lines and edges and saved a different render with all those in it so we can control how will it look like in the final image using #adobephotoshop.

Next is the pedestrian access and route.

It's a must that you use a different color on the information you want to portray in every diagram that you create. This will Help differentiate the diagrams from each other at first glance.

Then we model up the site amenities location and etc.

Followed by the views and prime unit model.

Other images that we exported which will be helpful while we are using the photoshop are below:

Vehicular and cycling path directional lines.

Pedestrian access and route directional lines. (I will also discuss on my future post on how to model up the directional lines faster in SketchUp)

On to #Adobephotoshop!!

Now that we have the base images for our diagrams, we need to spruce it up with the use of icons. There's a lot of free icons on the web which you can use. But for this I edited some of it to my liking.

Once done, we put every image in one photoshop file for easy access. We can just separate each info by folder.
Remember that we will be using the images without lines and edges as the base layer and above it will be the image with edges and so on.

Base layer

Building edges layer which will change the OPACITY to 30%

Directional lines layer. Notice that we only retain the directional sign here because if not the whole image will interfere the final diagram. We will also change its OPACITY to 30%.

Once combined this is how it will look like with the icons included.

Repeat the process for the other diagrams and now you can put it into your boards.

Just a reminder. Only do this when you finished all your important plans and perspective.

Cheers! Hope you like it!

Since this is my first tutorial. Kindly drop me a note or comments. I don't mind if you give me pointers or even if it's negative, cause this will help me improve my writing skills in the future. See yah next post!