You often times want to create the right mood in your architectural rendering to not only transport technical concepts, but rather emotions and a feeling! Therefore post production in Photoshop for your architectural illustrations plays a big role to add effects. For this task overlay textures with raindrops, snowflakes or fog are really helpful to quickly add these effects.

For a tutorial showing how to turn architectural rendering from daytime to a rainy mood I needed a “rain texture” that I can use to add raindrops to the image. Obviously I want to share with you the rain effect texture along with some others as well! But before you grab all the textures one word how to use them:

It is pretty simple and straight-forward:

1. Add the overlay texture as a new layer above your rendering
2. Scale or transform it according to your image size
3. Change layer blending mode. “Screen” or “Color Dodge” work fine but test
4. Reduce the layer opacity to control the power of the effect
5. Optional: Add a layer mask to better control the appearance by brushing parts black

Often times it is also better not not only use one texture, but rather combine several textures – just test and play around!

OK here are some overlay textures you can download for free. Please feel free to use them also for your commercial architectural rendering projects. Just add them to your library so you have them at your fingertips when you need them.

All images have a resolution of 3000 px x 2000 px which is totally fine for nearly all situations. Especially because it does not really hurt if you scale them up if required.

Free Rain Effect Textures:

Free Fog Overlay Textures: