Our Services Explained – Renderings
Continuing our series taking an in-depth look at our services (see the previous post on Schematic Design Services), today we’re dicussing Renderings. This is usually an optional service. In the history of our firm, most of our projects probably do not take advantage of this skill. It’s also a service that is changing rapidly. New tools are making these much easier to create and increasing their utility to more clients. This means it’s becoming more economically viable to provide or explore this service. This post might be out of date within a few months, hopefully we’ll update. If you want to skip forward to where drawings start to go from ideas to reality, see our next post in the series on permit drawings.
There are usually three potential reasons to pursue a rendering. The first, is as an artistic embellishment. The second is basically marketing. The last reason, and one that is becoming more and more common, is to actually test out design ideas. We’ll go through each of these cases.
Artistic Embellishment:
We’ve actually been hired a few times to create drawings purely for artistic reasons. It’s not super common, but can be a fun challenge. In some cases, it’s a client who wants to have an attractive drawing to hang on the wall or as a present. This can take a lot of forms, from a faux water color painting to a faux hand drafted drawing. Creating a piece of art from a drawing or an existing building is an interesting challenge. Creating a traditional looking blue print has it’s own challenge. Making a perfect CAD drawing and adding the imperfections and palimpsests, the over draws and construction lines and imperfections of the old ammonia copying process is very different from our usual work. Having been educated in hand drafting (and had a first professional job where my main duty seemed to be breathing ammonia fumes in a poorly ventilated basement with the blue-printer), it sometimes seems like it would be easier to do it old school. But photoshop, filters, and other modern tools can fake it without killing the braincells (or relying on obsolete equipment.)
This is not a super common service, mostly because it can’t really be justified economically. Having a beautiful drawing, painting, or other artistic image doesn’t usually have much use on it’s own (see below where it can come into play, although usually those renderings are more precise.) It’s usually purchased literally for aesthetic reasons or as a gift, but it’s a service we have done, and do enjoy, so don’t be shy to ask.
Marketing and Approvals
The second reason we create visualizations of a design is for clients who need something to get people excited. A common reason would be a church who is going to use the renderings as part of fundraising. It’s a lot easier for people to get excited over an image of a finished building than it is to just use the technical or even late schematic plans and elevations. These images can be of the exterior, or sometimes of a key interior space. For instance, again using a church as our example, the sanctuary space. Typically, because these need to be fairly accurate, they require a little more time to produce. You don’t want to use a tool that randomly adds design features or modifies the design because then people might feel a bit lied to.
Similarly, these renderings can be useful in presentations to planning and zoning approvals, historical commission submittals, and variance hearings. These can be useful because while these often volunteer based boards and commissions are supposed to be ruling purely on the merits, the better and more polished the presentation, the better chance. We’ve had hearings go horribly against our clients, but still gotten massive compliments on the design and presentation with good renderings which means we didn’t leave votes on the table at least.
It can also help to convince recalcitrant neighbors about the design, lessening public complaints, which never hurts getting approvals. With a rendering, while it looks realistic, you’re in control of the image. The focal length and camera angles, and you can choose to literally put your best foot forward. Find the image that puts your project in the best light and talk about that, instead of letting people’s imaginations fill in for you. If you’ve ever watched a horror movie, the least scary moment is when you see the monster. Our imaginations are great at imagining things that are way scary to ourselves than reality. By giving them a reality to talk about, you can remove the fears about your project.
Impressionistic Renderings
The last option we’re going to discuss is a service that’s always been a possibility, but become a lot more economical with the advent of modern image generation tools. That is to help a client choose between options. That could be colors, materials, or even full massing concerns.
Reading plans and converting between 2-d and 3-d is a skill, and not everyone has it. We’re thankful for that as it helps keep us gainfully employed. But that can make discussion design options difficult if all you have is plans and elevations. While that can adequately describe the building for many clients, and definitely to get it built, it doesn’t cut it for all clients. We’ve had legal clients who ignored the 12 pages of drawings for the 3 pages of textual specifications because THAT they could understand.
With new image generation tools, renderings that would have taken a day or two to generate, now can be put together in 20-30 minutes, allowing for quick generation of ideas for comparison. Usually, these renderings are not technically precise, since it’s more about big ideas or broad moves. An AI tool that hallucinates an extra door on the side elevation isn’t going to be a deal breaker here. The price you pay in accuracy, you gain back in sheer efficiency. Sometimes those hallucinations can even be a feature over a bug, since it may open up new ideas to pursue. Maybe you might ask, why don’t we have a door on the side of the building. Either way, this is becoming, more and more, a part of the base services. Although in our case, they are not automatically included into our services, we have utilized them on our own to help us have discussions and we can definitely include them if requested by the client.
