Architectural Renderings with an iPad

Yuki and I bought an iPad Pro 9.7 recently on craigslist, saving about $220. It was new in box and never opened. Yuki’s looking forward to coding on it and I thought it would be cool to try architectural renderings.

On Friday I threw together a model in sketchup of a building and exported some images. Then I loaded the same image into a few different sketching apps to test them out. Most apps are free with in app purchases to unlock all the features.

What I found is that there’s no perfect app for my needs. Unfortunately every app does things differently and each app has strengths and weakness.

Up first was Autodesk Sketchbook. I had a lot of trouble with the pens/pencil/brushes that were available and they didn’t work very well for me. As you can see below, I couldn’t texturize and the colour looks childish. As with all the other apps, having it completely unlocked would have helped substantially.

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Autodesk Sketchbook[/caption]

Most apps have layers and many different colours to choose from. The difficulty is that once you use a colour, sometimes it’s hard to comeback to that colour. Not all of the apps had an eyedropper to sample colours already on the screen for reuse.

I also started to discover that these drawing/sketching apps are set up to be like a blank piece of paper. That is, it’s set up for you to mix colours and create textures and stuff by painting over the same place with multiple different colours and different brushes. That’s fine for artists, but I’m not that interested in becoming that kind of artist or spending that kind of effort. An important aspect for my kind of work is being able to separate colours and areas by layer so that if I change the design and re-import in a new photo of the building, I don’t have to redo the whole image but just the part that’s changed.

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Concepts[/caption]

Morpholio trace was a dedicated architectural app. It had the advantage of stencils which I used to draw i the trees. The colour was also nice and some of the bushes or air brushes were useable for texturizing. It also had an onscreen ruler for drawing straight lines which was awesome! The downfall was that the pro version is not a one time purchase of around $6.99 like the other apps, but a monthly fee.

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Morpholio Traces[/caption]

Perhaps the most buggy but also the most relevant to the way I want to work was Tayasui sketches. It was one of the easiest to use and had the benefit of a water colour brush which I really like. When we tested it in the apple store, it was buggy but I think it’s probably one the one I’m going to go with.

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tayasui sketches[/caption]

I also tried paper but it’s really just a notebook that you can’t write on or have layers. At the apple store we tried procreate, the most popular drawing app, but some simple tasks like selecting a brush was incredibly difficult and there is no free version to try at home. So on one hand, I can get tayasui sketches which is a basic, simple, and easy to use app for colouring or I can take a leap of faith with procreate which is the photoshop of drawing apps — something that can do anything and everything but that you have to know how to use properly to get the full potential.

I’m excited to go further and see what kind of drawings I can produce. The hope is that I when I create SketchUp models at work and we need graphics I can make some architectural renderings fairly easily through an iPad app. If I’m going to be any good at these I’m going to have to watch youtube videos to see how to paint properly.

I’ll also have to figure out exactly where those architectural renderings fit into my workflow because the renderings from sketchup have been pretty useful thus far. I’m also looking into rendering in SketchUp and then exporting to photoshop for touchup and background details like trees and the sky. I haven’t been able to do this at work before because I didn’t have photoshop. I recently found a photo editing software that works through Chrome web browser so I’m going to have to give that a try too.

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Sketches, attempt 2 — with pro version[/caption]