Fluent Architectural Visualization Process

As a technical director at Ingot I'm always working on our systems to make every step of creating a 3D image more efficient. In an effort to make our systems better I've been challenging myself to produce images based on references in one hour or less. This helps me test multiple systems in our company from a high level perspective. It is easier to notice areas that need improvement when you go through the full cycle quickly.

Here are some of the systems and a brief explanation:

• Project management: This allow us to quickly create project structures and identify items for this project. Common tasks are automated with a click of a button and artist can start working very quickly on a new scene.
• Scene setup: We can quickly pick lighting condition and type of scene. All settings are taken care automatically from the combination of details collected from project management and scene options.
• Assets selection: We use asset managers to organize models, materials and textures in a way that allow the artist to compose the scene as fluent as the ideas comes to them. The goal is to not break the creativity flow with technical details that are irrelevant to that specific moment. For example, instead of 1000s of materials we reduce it to the smaller number of logical options first and then let the artist make specification as they need it on a later stage. If you just want an armchair, the system will try its best to chose the most suitable option for you. If you just want a quick sofa next, the system will find a sofa that matches the armchair and so on.
• Rendering: Instead of expressing your intention with settings (which could be 100s of settings) we just define a few options that covers 99% of the cases. If you just want to quickly preview something, it is just a button press. If you want to create the final image with the best quality, it is just another button press. You don't have to set names or anything, as it was all predefined on the project management stage. Sometimes the system will have to ask the artist if they intended to make a certain decision to confirm before proceeding. This just happens when there is an ambiguous situation that might affect the end result. Everything else is decided by the system. The typical result of this is close to 0% mistakes due to rendering.
• Post production: This follow the same patterns already explained up to here.

Here is the latest image I challenged myself to create in an hour or less.

This of course doesn't test the other systems we have in place that are more important for real projects, that help us organize data, manage the revisions, consolidate comments and markups, distribute digital files including a progression of each image and the project as whole.

The goal of these challenges is to reach a level in which we focus 99% of our time in doing what matters the most, which in our case is solving visualization challenges that our clients have. Ideas should flow fluently directly to the artist screen, sometimes even as they talk to the client. That continuous flow is what allow artist to go beyond in quality and service provided. If they are constantly interrupted by irrelevant repetitive technical steps, this flow is broken and the work is less enjoyable.

If you like this kind of topic and want to know more, or need similar systems to your company please get in touch.