A long time ago, I put together a day to night illustration for my Philly Bridge project. Back then, I had a hard time deciding what kind of scene lighting to go with so I just did both and ended up creating a tutorial around how you could shift an image from daytime to night all in Photoshop. For the MIT project, I again was struggling to decide what time of day to go with so I decided to go with a “Day versus Night” series of images again. There were elements in the view such as the green courtyard that would have a better narrative with daytime light, but then elements such as the brass portal entry would have a more dramatic reading at night. It became clear that creating both a day and night illustration of the same view could be a powerful way of showing how these elements change and adapt with different lighting.

This time around, I didn’t make the transition from day to night all in Photoshop as I did with the Philly Bridge images. I setup the model with completely different lighting for each image so that I could be a little more accurate with materials and reflections. It is also just a massive time saver rigging the model with lights rather than managing in Photoshop. Back when I created the Philly Bridge images, the materials I was using in 3D were less refined and my 3D lighting abilities were not as strong. Therefore it was quicker for me to actually make it all happen in Photoshop. Nowadays, I am relying on the 3D much more to get reflections and textures where I want which saves time and is more accurate.