How do we visualize our scenes

Raymond and Partners — tech story

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Raymond and Partners

3 min readJun 30, 2022

Architecture Visualization (ArchViz) is a union of the fields of architecture and CG. That union is a fairly recent innovation in the history of both fields. The need for realistic project previews has stimulated the creation of software for that effect, that focus on specific tasks, such as the creation of plants, roofs, terrain, urban environments, parametric models, skies, crowds, etc.

Being able to render an image or creating an animation, we use several techniques and go trough some important steps.

A few steps on the way to a perfectly visualized image:

Render Engine

To choose the right rendering engine it’s quite difficult task due to their strengths and/or weaknesses regarding image quality and fast time process:

Either a long wait for good sharpness transition in depth or in real time but rough edges.
Either powerful computers or everything in the cloud
Either generating reel displacements or calculating fake shadow via bump maps.

Most important is to choose the engine for a project, don’t choose one for general. There may be a project where you need a quick result or a project where you need to show as much detail as possible.

Camera Setup & Compositing

Especially if you want to create visualizations, your cameras should generate more than just a shot, they should tell a story. It’s not always about making the most unobvious camera you can think of, sometimes it’s more about clarity, relying on the effect we want to achieve.

Lighting Setup

Lighting is the most powerful tool to capture emotions, it can change the attitude, atmosphere, and depth of any image. This is why we pay a lot of attention to it in our workflow. Creating insane lighting scenarios is the key to assembling visualizations that catch the attention of a viewer.

Fog and Volumetric effect

Adding Fog and Volumetric effect assembles a huge difference in the result. It impacts the realism of the images by adding layers and depth to them. However, it also creates a mood and atmosphere that cannot be achieved without this effect.

Advanced Materials

There is a giant gap between basic materials and advanced ones, and it mainly refers to the level of details. Understanding materials in real life and knowing how to recreate them will hop the visualization to a new level.

Postproduction

Postproduction is one of these things that can help or break your image. We use postproduction to add attitude and atmosphere to the image, to underline the most important parts of the visualization and to keep general balance and color balance.