Nicholas Sunderland, design director of Twos Company Interior Design and NS Interiors, discusses the benefits of 3D art over hand-drawn sketches.
In today’s design world there are two types of designer; the draw and the not draw. The hand drawn imagery is aesthetically pleasing, fluid and often open to some interpretation, but is slow to produce and can lack depth in a marketplace that wants an instant perspective on the design.
Visualisation is a key part of our interior design practice. High-quality and impressive presentations when designing for hotels greatly affect the customer’s decision when they can see photorealistic images of the rooms and areas that also have to impress the clientele.
For all of us time is money, and sketching half a dozen views of one room from different perspectives is very time consuming, and I realised this very early on when more user friendly software such as ArchLineXP came on to the market. Traveling to site and measuring or taking architects drawings and sketching from them was not always accurate.
Take a hotel bedroom, there may be 150, and the layout may be similar across the building but the finish needs to be different in many rooms, so multiple drawings with different finishes need to be created as the deadline looms ahead.
The solution, fast CGI renditions with the ability to change room colours furnishings textures in minutes. The architect does the hard work right at the beginning and with accurate DWG files you can take these and start your room by room designs in simple 3D, planning, building the layout in a few short hours. Systems running side by side allow you to work on GA plans and simultaneously creating a 3D room.
By adding realistic furniture, floor coverings fabrics lighting and finishes you can take that drawing, save it as multiple copies and change the interior style in each one in even less time. You could do a room an hour, what’s not to like about CGI?
The beauty of this is the client can easily see what they are paying for and what their guests will see. Each designer knows the importance of the first impression, and how influential it can be on the customer.
Drawings don’t often provide the customer with the necessary information to make a decision. They usually cannot imagine themselves inside the room, and cannot feel the final surrounding environment. The latest thing of course is Virtual reality, and again CGI can provide this.
Every drawing we produce can be converted to VR, your overseas client can sit in the room you have just designed while you update it as you talk to them!
