Back to bridge illustrations for me. These may look nice, but there's not that much to them, at least in the way of digital painting. For images like these with critical relationships of structures to each other, it's easiest to build them as 3D models. As usual, I worked in Cinema 4D. Making something like a bridge can be a bit tricky, as I had no definite schematics to work from, just low quality photos and conceptual artwork done by someone else. But I made it work. The final result may not be perfectly accurate from an architectural point of view, but it works for my purposes.
I did do a bit of texturing for the geometry and rendered with Ambient Occlusion and Global Illumination to get realistic highlights and shadows. the renders were done as multi-pass so that I could take them into Photoshop and separate out the parts I needed. There was some background painting and touch up here and there to band things up and add a bit more realism and get away from that sterile look so common in many 3D renders. Overall, I think they look okay. On the bottom cofferdam image, the water isn't a photo, but I started with water photos to pull selections out of to make the final layers. For detailed waves and ripples, I've found that this technique is much more efficient than painting water from scratch. I used the same steps for the water in a previous illustration. You can check out my tutorial on how to do it here.
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