process

Here's an example of how my process flow works.
I have three types of apartment units, each a different size, that I put together in a somewhat rational or potentially interesting way. I'm using Revit to do all of this work at this point. Each unit is actually an identical component so that later on, I can edit that component and all of the units of the same type will change. Once I had the basic unit blocks, in Revit it's simple to put them together and move them around. The purple blocks are two bedrooms, the light blue blocks are one bedrooms, and the green blocks are studios.

I've also created a site model in Revit, which I link this file into to let me see how my massing works in the site- that is, how it relates to buildings nearby, how it looks at the corner, scale, etc.

I have a corner site with two massive buildings to the west and southwest of me, and a big ugly postmodern governmental building directly to the east which creates an ugly triangle of parking. From a bird's eye view, it would look something like this:

I've actually set this image up in a very deliberate way, since I have an image taken from Microsoft Bing maps that has almost identical point of view in relation to the site. As masses, these don't really tell me that much, and its better to look at the building in more detail. So I take this image into photoshop with the Bing aerial photography, and in about two minutes I have this:

Using the same techniques from different perspectives within my Revit model, I take snapshots of my digital model that correspond to actual photos I've taken of the site.

And with the same process in photoshop, bring this image into the photograph. There is a bit of set up work where I have to trace out the tree and the light pole and the traffic light, but once you set up the foreground as a layer, I can quickly swap in buildings to test them out. This lets me really get a feel for how the building might feel in the site. I've set up about three or four of these kinds of images from different places around the site, so it really streamlines the process.