My client had an urgent need crop up during a high-pressure moment, and so had me produce a coloured elevation for Design Review on a very tight turnaround.

This first image is the base elevation linework from the client:

Here we can clearly see how shadows add depth, a strong sense of massing, and drama:

Glazing colour adds a sense of the fenestration as distinct from the solid massing:

Rough materiality gives us a first-pass sense of which elements are made from what, and how chroma and value inter-relate in the design intent.

 

A sky backdrop gives the contextual connexion of this house design to its surrounding reality.

There's also some carefully-constructed ambient occlusion here to help the viewr's sense of spatial relationships - it enhances the form derived by the shadows.

Advanced materiality textured give a more visceral feel to the materials, which are never as smooth as first depicted.

Finally, careful tweaking of the materials in reference to the client's colour board, added variation in the stone base material, some chromatic punch on the vegetation, dropping back of the strength of the ambient occlusion effect to make it subtle but still read, and lastly correction of an error in the dormer window shadows and the left entry pilaster shadow get us to the finished piece.

And these last two are just for my own satisfaction - this is the level of quality my client could have had with both one more day and a different brief - this is not a 2D coloured elevation: it is a low LOD (Level Of Detail) rendered elevation having taken the ArchiCAD model export into Modo and having done quick and rough materials assignments.

No effort made on the landscape, just enough plant entourage to imply the quality available - I chose, due to the colours of the home, to depict the landscape as being autumnal, and in the later afternoon, with a sllght warm cast to the sunlight and a concomitant lower sun angle. 

And of course, once that initial materiality and lighting work is done, other POVs are a relatively minor matter, if the model's well developed... so to go from a coloured elevation to a perspective vignette is relatively straightforward; with a traditional 2D approach (as above) it would require redrawing the entire thing.