Introduction
It’s no secret that architecture and interior design are visual artforms. No matter how beautiful or descriptive a project’s narrative is, words are only supplemental to what you see. Hearing about the huge picture windows that frame breathtaking views, or the seamless integration of natural stone with manufactured steel siding, is nothing compared to stepping inside your dream home for the first time. How can we as designers convince our clients to trust the process? What can the designer do to show the client what a building will look like before the first brick is laid? As designers, we try to assemble a set of construction documents that not only inform the contractor on how to construct the building, but that inspires the client. Although important pieces of the puzzle, drawings of foundation insulation details and subfloor assemblies are often far from inspiring. This is where renderings come in. The ability to show realistic images of what a project will look like before it’s built can be the single most effective way to convey your design ideas to clients, consultants, contractors, and fellow designers. Renderings are about creating trust and getting the team excited about the project, but they also play some very important roles throughout the design and construction processes. Understanding what renderings are, how to make them, and when to use them, are essential to building trust with your clients. Renderings help designers effectively communicate with the design team and translate the ideas in your head into a functional building.
What is (a) Rendering?
“Rendering” will get thrown around a lot in the next few paragraphs, but what does the word itself mean? There are dozens of formal definitions, but for the purpose of our story, we will simplify it down to two, one noun, and one verb. A rendering (noun) is simply an image; a picture created by adding necessary information and removing unnecessary information. The process of creating the rendering itself is often referred to as rendering (to render, verb). Architects and designers understand renderings as a realistic image created either by hand or through computer aided design, that shows what a building or space will look like once it is built. These are interior and exterior views that often include everything from finish siding materials, accurate paint colors, furniture layouts, environmental context, and in some cases people and animals. These images can either be two or three dimensional, depending on the information the designer intends to show. All done to show the team how we as designers envision the space looking and feeling once constructed.
How do you make them?
There are countless tools used by designers to help create renderings, but they typically fall into one of two categories, hand drawing and computer aided. Hand drawn renderings, though largely antiquated, still play an important role in design. These paintings and drawings add finished materials, shading, shadows, and color to breathe life into the design. Today, designers rarely include hand drawings in completed sets of construction documents. These renderings take time, depending on desired quality, often requiring multiple passes. Starting with a basic pencil sketch, then adding ink to outline important elements, and finally using paint, ink, or color pencils to add color and vibrancy to the image. These drawings can take hours, especially when considering variables like multiple color options or changes from the client.
Although the basic idea is the same, computer aided design takes the rendering process to an entirely different level. We as designers, in collaboration with our team, still need to make important decisions, like what materials to add to the exterior of the building, but instead of drawing each brick individually by hand, we scroll through databases of seemingly infinite material patterns and with a few mouse clicks, we can see thousands of square feet of building façade clad entirely in masonry. When I began using computer aided rendering tools in my second year of design school in 2016, advancements in this technology were happening at a rapid pace. It seemed almost weekly a new software hit the market. Through free trials and student discounts, design students were the guinea pigs for this rapidly advancing industry. But, as the developers were pushing the limits of their own software and the limits of our computers, the highest quality renderings could take hours. We used to joke we would hit “RENDER” on the computer and then it’d be time to go get lunch or a coffee. We often found ourselves torn as to whether we thought it would be faster to create a rendering on the computer, or to draw it by hand. Over the course of just a few years though, technology did improve. Integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into these rendering programs sped up the process tremendously. We went from getting a high-quality image in a couple hours to a couple of seconds – all but erasing hand drawing from our vocabularies’. As a result, though, input from the designer dwindled. Even when using computer rendering software, the designer still needs to do a lot of leg work. Rendering programs are most often supplemental to or built into modeling software. The designer still needs to take the time to model the digital building, make material selections, and tell the program what they wanted the building to look like. Now, with the integration of AI, these programs can pull information from online databases and make a lot of these decisions for us. This can be dangerous, especially when you have an entire team of clients, consultants, and contractors relying on you to tell them what a building will look like. A client, for example, may see a material color or a window layout added in by AI early in the design process that then changes or disappears in the next rendering, simply because it was never intended to be there in the first place. This loss of continuity creates confusion throughout the design process and can lead to the rest of the team losing trust in the designer.
Choosing your style of rendering and when to utilize them
There are pros and cons to both hand drawing and computer renderings. Where hand drawing has the advantage, even to this day, is early in the schematic design phase. This is the earliest phase of design, when the team is trying to understand the needs of the client, challenges associated with the building site, and environmental factors like views, sun angles, and utilities. In the schematic phase, quick impromptu sketches are still the best way the designer can convey design ideas to the rest of the team, especially in an in-person meeting. The rough and imperfect nature of a quick sketch can also be beneficial early in the process. Though still falling under the term rendering, a drawing like this has far less information than something you would see toward the end of a project. Sketchy and irregular lines let the client know this is just a sketch, just an idea. The team can discuss and explore ideas without feeling like they are committing to anything. An idea can change simply by tearing off a new piece of tracing paper and starting over. A computer-generated rendering lacks imperfection. Sharp lines and vibrant material selections can communicate and often encourages a fully thought out and “finished” design, not just an idea. While this is ideal for the later stages of a project, showing the team too much information too early can stunt creativity, and create confusion and disrupt communication within the team.
From schematic design, we move into design development. In my experience, this is when we start to transition from hand sketches and basic ideas to an accurate model of the building done on the computer. The basic layout of the floor plan is done, the building is positioned on the site, and the basic form of the structure starts to take shape. There are a lot of ways we utilize renderings in this phase of the design. Once we have a basic computer model, we can add simulated sun angles to show how shadows move across a room, and we can add and remove thousands of material options with the click of a mouse. This is also when we can start adding in environmental contexts like accurate topography models and even images of the neighborhood. This helps us finetune the best locations for windows and doors and helps us communicate what this building will look like in relation to existing elements like buildings or trees on the site.
While a lot of the benefits come in the early design phases, renderings still play an important role throughout the construction of a project. We as designers strive to provide as detailed a set of drawings as possible, but two-dimensional details don’t always provide the full picture. Depending on the project, we will often include and handful of renderings in the final set of construction documents. This helps in many ways. This not only provides contractors with an image to assess their work against but also provides an opportunity for coordination within the design team. This is especially important for consultants and subcontractors who may not have been involved in the design from the start. Whether it’s a sign manufacturer trying to match building signage with a siding color, or a mason selecting the right kind of stone cladding, these renderings help convey the intent of the design to anyone not involved with the project from the beginning.
Renderings also provide some benefits that don’t necessarily fall under any of the specific phases of a design discussed above. Renderings are an important tool in generating excitement about a project. Whether it be a local school district encouraging residents to vote for a bond to help fund the construction of a new high school, or Habitat for Humanity informing the public about the new community they intend to build to help folks find affordable housing, renderings help give people a glimpse into the future. These are real, almost photorealistic images of how great a community can be, with just a little bit of trust from the residents and foresight from the designers. In addition to generating excitement (and funding) for very attainable projects, renderings can also represent projects beyond the limits of current building technology. Some of the largest architecture firms in the world have whole teams dedicated to hypothetical projects, often in the form of design challenges or competitions posed by professional organizations or design schools around the world. These competitions range in scope from designing a community of tiny homes to help ease the affordable housing crisis, to designing entire cities in outer space. In most cases, these projects are never actually intended to be built. Yet, winners of these competitions often receive substantial prize money, global recognition, and future employment opportunities. Although some design competitions do eventually lead to real projects, that is not always the intent. Obvious technological and financial limitations prevent entire cities from being built on the moon, but even small communities of tiny homes face a lot of the same hurdles. Rendering tools, especially computer rendering software, grant designers the ability to show the world what life may look like 10, 100, or 1,000 years in the future. These competitions and subsequent project renderings are intended to showcase the capabilities of current rendering tools and show the world the foresight of the top innovators in the world of architectural design.
Closing
For those of you outside the design profession, hopefully now when you hear the word “rendering” you’ll have a better understanding of what us designers are talking about. And for all you fellow designers, hopefully you learned something about the importance and best way to utilize renderings throughout the life of a project. While flashy and exciting, renderings are crucial to ensuring the integrity of the client and designer’s vision.
– Austyn Traxler, Architect In Training