Tips for Adding People into Perspectives

1. Scale. 
It can be difficult to get your people textures at the right scale in your architectural illustration. If you're not good a doing this by eye, then a good trick is to insert a crowd of lowpoly 3d people into your scene and do a quick render. You can then use this image in a separate layer in photoshop while you're compositing your people. (or trees, cars etc.) 
2. Context. 
Does the person fit the context of your image. Its self-explanatory you're not going to put a man in jeans and a T-shirt into a formal business environment, but you should also review the persons pose, and whether they fit naturally in the location you're trying to put them. 
3. Lighting.
Compare the lighting in your illustration with the lighting of your people. For example, people textures that are sharply lit will obviously fit better into a sunlit area of your illustration, but take note of the direction that the light is coming from as well. 
4. Color Harmony.
I believe colour harmony is important when compositing people with an architectural illustration. What I mean is that the colour of the clothing of your people should be in harmony with the colours in your rendering. This is important because what you're trying to show off is the architecture - not the people. If your people textures represent a psychedelic rainbow of colours, then that could distract the viewers eye somewhat ! 
5. Colour Correction.
Not the same as colour harmony, but has a similar intention. Your people textures may have a red hue to them, but your architectural illustration has alot of blue tones in it. For a more convincing result its good to colour correct your composited texture to match the colour tones of your image. The same comment is valid for the people texture's saturation. Not only is the result more convincing, but it also means that your people will not stand out, and detract the viewers attention from the architecture. 
6. Blending Modes & Transparency.
Once you've pasted your people into a scene, don't just be happy to leave them in their original state. Play around with the layer blending modes, change their transparency, blur them, even make a clone of the layer and apply different blending to each layer. If you just leave them in their raw state, most of the time they won't look like they blend with your image. Playing around with the layer modes etc., can help create a better harmony with your architectural illustration. 
7. Composition in Space.
Should that person really be there ? Make a judgement on the composition of your people within the scene. Move them around until they look right, and so that they don't diminish an important architectural aspect of the view. 
8. Shadows and Reflections.
Pretty straight forward, but don't forget to create shadows and reflections of your people textures if necessary - it helps themsit better in a scene.... You can also blur shadows or reflections if the scene requires


From http://www.3dfabrique.com/architectural_illustration.html

Wall Section Examples

Click on each image to enlarge

 Collective Experiments. E. Croquis. (TCDC)

 Steven Holl. El Croquis. (TCDC)

Recent Waterscapes. (TCDC)

 Materials for Design. (TCDC)

Toyo Ito. El Croquis. (TCDC)

RCR Architects. El Croquis.(TCDC)

 

RCR Architects. El Croquis.(TCDC)

 

Perspective Examples

click to enlarge.

Andrew TenBrink

Lincoln Center, Diller Scofidio Renfro

Lincoln Center, Diller Scofidio Renfro

Timber Crossing, Hood Landscape

GROSS Max Landscape Architects

GROSS Max Landscape Architects

GROSS Max Landscape Architects

'paisajes emergentes' architecture firm

check out this amazing design firm's work for some ideas on how to create brilliant perspectives for your project.  http://www.paisajesemergentes.com/

Diller Scofidio + Renfro - Arbores Laetae (Joyful Trees)

Tree Walks

Kew Gardens Tree Walk

ForestWalk, Singapore, designed by LOOK Architects

Mamu Rainforest Walkway, Australia

These examples of tree canopy circulation routes do not touch the trees, yet allow people to see trees from an elevated position.

Site analysis: The Different Vantage and View Points of the Site

These first three images presents the site comparison during the day and night time. As you can

see, the site during the day is much more dominant and visible then at night since during night

time, there is very less electricity surrounding the site area. It is very dark and most of the light

are present along the road. This proves that during the night time, not much attention is drawn to the site compared to the daytime.

These next two images show the comparison of the photographs taken looking into the site and looking out from the site. It presents the surroundings of the site.

The next image shows the traffic in front of the faculty of architecture where as seen on the plan, towards the left of the diagram, which is the front gate, it shows a green color to represent that the traffic here is free flow where cars drive at a considerably fast speed. As you drive through to the faculty, the diagram shows orange color to show how cars start to slow down as it gets near to the guard post. Then, once you are in the area of the guard post where you receive Chula cards, it is a red on the diagram to show that cars have to stop in this area to get the cards. Finally, after they receive the cards, the diagram shows a green color again which shows how cars accelerate their car speeds as soon as they get the cards and once again, the traffic is a free flow.

The last image shows the distractions from different view points. This diagram is made by the point of views of Guide and me. It is recorded through the video camera where we both took the same route starting from the opposite side of our faculty's terrace and walk through, recording all the distractions that made us turn. This is to see if different walkers notice the site as they walk on the sidewalk on a normal day where there is always some sort of distraction like cars, people talking, and etc. The green color on this diagram represents the route that both Guide and I took. The blue dots represents Guide's distraction location while the red dots represents mine. Then, we write captions through each distraction that we see along our walk passing the site. We came to a conclusion that most distractions are from anything moving, has noise, or has some sort of interactions with each other.