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The tools of the trade have come a long way since drafting tables, triangles and scale rules. Now that nearly every office and household owns a computer, the work that we do as designers is largely digital.
Software tools play a significant role in the life of an architect, and one of the major benefits of these programs is the ability to create digital architectural renderings. In this article, we discuss the various software, benefits, and resources to get you started.
Architects, students and visualizers use this technology to create perspectives, videos, and immersive tours of their projects. This allows clients, stakeholders and peers to view and experience the buildings long before they are built.
Ray tracing and raster based rendering are both widely used in the architecture industry. The main difference, and the main reason for the massive gap in rendering times between the two, lies in the way they perform the rendering computations.
Ray tracing uses a large amount of computing power to simulate the actual behavior of light within the scene, accounting for every single ray spreading out onto surfaces, reflecting and refracting off of materials and objects.
Real-time rendering is used to move around and interact with a render environment. The term refers to the quick and constant updating of rendered imagery, such that it feels real-time and interactive.
This type of interface allows for high quality previews within the viewport before creating a final image. The preview makes it easier to adjust things like camera angles, textures, light, and shadow, and can also guide designers in making informed decisions about the spaces.
Essentially, these programs make use of powerful computer hardware to create video game-like environments out of your 3D models. Images are updated with every movement and can be synchronized to update with every change to the 3D model as well.
In order to produce high quality visuals to showcase your projects, you or course need to using the right tools. Having good rendering software is vital to ensure that your designs are shown in the best way possible.
V-Ray is one of the industry leaders for architectural rendering due to it being capable of achieving high level photorealism, but it has long been behind in terms of render speed, interface, and ease of use.
Additional features include built-in materials, an online asset library, and compatibility with cloud rendering services. The asset library, Chaos Cosmos, allows you to add detailed, render-ready 3D content to your V-Ray projects in minutes.
The cloud service, Chaos Cloud, is a one-click cloud rendering solution. V-Ray is compatible with render farms and other cloud rendering solutions as well. These services take the load off of your computer by rendering your image on a much larger network of computers to save you time and resources.
Corona Renderer has been growing in popularity due to its simple settings and realistic results. It solely uses CPU power to render images, and it uses a lean ray tracing process to produce photorealism within reasonable rendering times.
Maxwell Render is an unbiased 3D render engine, developed by Next Limit Technologies in Madrid, Spain. This stand-alone software is used in the film, animation, and VFX industry, as well as in architectural and product design visualization.
Maxwell is one of the top rendering softwares for light simulation. It achieves this by cutting no corners and calculating each ray consistently. Previous versions of Maxwell were known to be slow in this process, but their latest update includes support for multi-GPU rendering.
Substance by Adobe is a neat new set of tools for creating, texturing, and rendering 3D objects and scenes. Substance is widely used in game and movie production as well as in product design, fashion, and architecture.
KeyShot is an interactive ray tracing and global illumination program developed by Luxion. It is most commonly used for industrial design and product visuals, but in architectural rendering it is used to showcase interior scenes and furniture.
Twinmotion is developed by Epic Games and powered by Unreal Engine. The program combines advanced rendering tools with a game-like interface to offer an immersive rendering experience that is both easy to learn and powerful to use.
Twinmotion has quickly become one of the most popular rendering tools due to its icon-driven settings, high quality real-time previews, and multifunctional results. It is capable of making images, videos, panoramas, and virtual reality presentations.
D5 Render is a relatively new real-time raytracing engine. It boasts fast renders and a simple interface, with a quickly growing cloud-based asset library containing over 5000 different objects, PBR materials, and people.
Blender is known as a public project, a free and open-source creation suite built by 3D artists, for 3D artists. It is a cross-platform software that supports the entire 3D pipeline, including modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering composting, and motion tracking.
With its easy accessibility and global community, numerous tools are constantly being added and updated to improve the software. Many architects use Blender as an all-in-one substitute for 3D modeling, parametric geometry, rendering, and animation.
It is becoming an essential tool for the design process to analyze space, light, and the relationship of forms. Interactive Enscape scenes can also be exported as standalone executable files for viewing on computers without the software installed, and these can be uploaded for online viewing as well.
The program and its entire asset library are saved and installed locally on your computer, making it a versatile standalone product for in the office, at home, or on the go. It has widespread compatibility with 3D programs, and some powerful tools for shaping land topography, bodies of water, 3D materials, and animated vegetation.
FloorGenerator is a plugin that helps you generate floor objects consisting of individual boards which can easily be textured using MultiTexture. It creates actual 3D elements and can be used to make floor finishes that do not tile and do not pixelate with expansion.
Artisan is a SketchUp extension filled with powerful organic modeling tools. It is perfect for designers to create terrain, furniture, characters, abstract sculptures, fabric, curtains, plants, and more.
With FredoScale you can orientate the selection box around a set of objects and interactively apply a number of geometric transformations, such as Scaling, Tapering, Stretching, Planar Shear, Twisting, Bending and Rotation.
Tools On Surface, part of the Fredo6 Collection, is a suite of tools for drawing on curved surfaces, with lines, various shapes, offset and Freehand / Polyline. It provides an inference mechanism, a Contour Editor and a dedicated Eraser.
GrowFX is the most advanced plant generator plug-in for 3ds Max, allowing you to create and animate any plant procedurally. GrowFX creates broad-leaf, coniferous and palm trees, flowers, ivy and other kinds of foliage.
Model + Model is a popular 3D models store, featuring highly detailed assets and bundles for every category. They are a leading provider of iconic design objects for 3D visualization, with a wide selection of both commercial and free 3D models.
Their site features high definition 3D objects, exterior and interior models, HDRI skies, and various Archmodel bundles. They also host contests, surveys, and tutorials to help develop the architectural rendering community.
CGtextures, now known as Textures.com, is a trusted provider of premium texture images. They have high resolution digital pictures of all sorts of materials, and their textures have been used by some of the most well known names in the CG industry.
Kerkythea is a freeware software that can produce high quality renders without spending a cent on software licensing. Now available for Windows, Linux and MacOSX, it accepts 3ds Max and OBJ models, with a free exporter for SketchUp.
Various line styles can be added to produce artistic hand-drawn, painted, or technical hard line looks. It is primarily used with 3D models in Blender to produce stylized or graphical representations.
There are a growing number of open-source programs available, wherein users take development matters into their own hands. These communities create some of the most useful plugins and add-ons, and they often do it for free.
Everyone has different needs, making it difficult to determine which software is truly the best for rendering. Some people will favor only the most realistic options, while others will favor the most practical applications to use.
Known for having one of the most simplistic interfaces, Twinmotion is regarded as the easiest to learn rendering program in the industry. Its settings and functions are built around icons, and the navigation controls are similar to gameplay.
Many programs have Lumion beat in photorealism, control of settings, and interoperability, but architects continue to use the program on a regular basis thanks to its impressive speed and user-friendliness.
Its massive library of built-in trees, people, and vehicles make it fast and easy to populate a scene, set up an image, and render. Power users are capable of creating huge city scenes in Lumion for professional render work, and the straightforward video tools make it simple to create video animations.
3ds Max users can also use Corona Renderer for photorealistic rendering on a Mac. For other 3D modeling and rendering needs, there are a few alternatives available as well, including Blender, Cinema 4D, and Modo.
Technology has drastically changed the way architecture is practiced. Software tools have quickly become the primary instruments of architects around the world to document buildings and communicate ideas.
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