7 Tips for Improving Your Architectural Visualization Skills in Rendering

When you design your 3D render, you can turn it into an asset for a usable game (walking tour), a VR game, a video or an image. These are your end products. This article offers tips on the design process and offers tips on camera placement so that your end product looks a little more realistic.

My article can be helpful for individuals who are interested in improving their architectural visualization skills, particularly those who work in 3D rendering, game design, virtual reality, and photography. It can also be useful for architects, designers, and artists who want to enhance their understanding of real-world lighting, camera angles, atmosphere, and edge rounding in their visualizations.

1 – Try to Recreate Real-World Lighting

This is a tough one to describe, but it all revolves around understanding how light works in real life. For example, in real life, smaller light sources may make certain areas appear darker than they are. Such as if you imagine a club with overhead lights.

Imagine you put lights along the forward-facing part of the nightclub bar. These lights would actually make the shadows under the bar much darker. If you put a candle in your garden while in the sunlight, it doesn’t create light on the surfaces around it. Digital renders will often add some sort of lighting effect around small light sources when in real life they wouldn’t create produce any light into the surrounding areas.

2 – Use a Realistic Camera Angle

This rule has changed a little bit now that drones allow people to see all sorts of weird angles in real life. Nevertheless, if you are trying to sell the idea of a realistic house or building, then only give fly-over shots. When you take other shots, position your camera at the sort of height and position you would expect if a human took the photo.

3 – Test and Re-Test

Have you ever seen those old Disney animators who used to do it all on paper? They would draw a little, pull up the first sheet to check their work, look at the previous frame, put down the paper and draw the next bit, check the last frame and so forth. They used to do it all very quickly so that all you heard was a room of people crinkling paper as they worked.

As a digital artist, you can get a preview of a single frame if you don’t mind waiting, but if you want to check your work, you need to use a rendering service like RebusFarm. Like the Disney artists, it is highly recommended that you keep checking your work (though not as often obviously). A brilliant way to improve is to send off a full render for processing at the end of your working day/shift. Don’t look at the render until you download it the next morning. That way, you can see your design’s perfections and flaws with fresh eyes when you start work again.

4 – Create a Believable Atmosphere

When most people think of this, they think of creating the sort of scary fog you see in horror games like Silent Hill 2, but that is not strictly the case. You can create atmosphere with the weather, such as throwing a few clouds in the sky, but you can also do it with lighting effects and even with the glare from reflections.

When an image looks clinical and sterile, it looks less realistic. Study a number of real photographs to see the subtle way that the atmosphere affects the end result.

5 – Don’t Use Lens Effects or Filters

This is more of a modern mistake. People think that lens flare makes a scene or photograph look more realistic, but it really doesn’t. Camera effects do not make a scene look realistic either. If your scene doesn’t look realistic to start with, then these effects and filters only change the flavor of unrealistic. Compare them side by side, and you may decide that the filters make it look better, but they don’t make it look more realistic. They just obscure the issue and make it more difficult to create a fair comparison.

6 – Use Imperfections Very Sparingly

This is another artistic nuance you need to understand. The imperfections you add, such as dirt, need to be super subtle. In real life, building brickworks don’t always have cracks in them, and windows don’t always have reflective imperfections. When you think about imperfections, consider the logic and then scale it down. For example, did the rain kick up a tiny bit of dirt onto the bottom of the building? If so, take how much dirt you would have added and lower it by about 55%.

7 – Understand Edge Rounding

The first point on this list, a recreating real-world lighting, was something you learn from years of experience and it includes a lot of artistic nuances. This point is the same. Buildings can have sharp edges, but you have to imagine that you are taking a photo with a real camera, and the further you walk away from a sharp edge, the duller (rounder) it appears. This is because our eyes cannot see very sharp edges from far away. That is why some 3D render designers will round edges a little so that their photos and videos look more realistic.

Closing

This article provides tips for improving architectural visualization skills, including recreating real-world lighting, using a realistic camera angle, testing and re-testing, creating a believable atmosphere, avoiding lens effects and filters, using imperfections sparingly, and understanding edge rounding. These tips can help make 3D renders look more realistic and improve their overall quality.

  1. The article provides tips for improving architectural visualization skills, including recreating real-world lighting, using a realistic camera angle, testing and retesting, creating a believable atmosphere, and understanding edge rounding.
  2. To make a 3D render look more realistic, it is important to understand how light works in real life and to try to recreate real-world lighting.
  3. Testing and retesting is important when creating architectural visualizations, and using a rendering service like RebusFarm can be helpful in checking your work.
  4. It’s important to create a believable atmosphere in your render, which can be achieved through weather effects, lighting effects, and reflections.
  5. Using imperfections and understanding edge rounding are artistic nuances that can help make architectural visualizations look more realistic. Imperfections should be used sparingly and rounded edges can make buildings look more natural.

Calling all Architects and Engineers: 3 Steps to Tap Into Visualization with 3ds Max Tool

These 3ds Max tips for project visualization are courtesy of Arup Connect via Redshift partner ArchDaily, “the world’s most visited architecture website.” ArchDaily is dedicated to informing and inspiring architects worldwide to improve the quality of life for an estimated three billion people who will move into cities over the next 40 years.

Arup Connect is the online magazine of Arup, an independent firm of designers, planners, engineers, consultants, and technical specialists. For this article excerpt, Arup Connect interviewed Arup visualization specialist Anthony Cortez about how he uses 3ds Max, the skills visualization artists need during design and construction phases, and how augmented reality in construction is changing the face of visualization.

1. First Things First: What’s It For? 

“The strength of 3ds Max is its versatility,” Cortez says. “It’s not a one-industry tool. From film, visual effects, video games, and commercials to arch vis, people use Max for modeling, texture mapping, lighting, animation, and rendering. Architects use it to visualize models of buildings. There are game designers that use it to create game cinematics and environments; the visual effects industry uses it to create explosions and crowd simulations.

Read more on design, architecture, and gaming.

“Here at Arup we use all of that stuff that Hollywood and the game designers use, but we apply it to engineering applications. We have lighting engineers here in the office; they study how light hits surfaces and reflects off of and is absorbed by materials. We use 3ds Max to visualize how light physically behaves in real life. These days, it’s really hard to tell the difference between a photo and a rendering.

“There’s also a project that we’re working on, a new New York bridge, where we’re taking photography from various vantage points around the Hudson Valley area and camera-matching the new bridge design to the survey and photographs and create photorealistic visual impact studies, to show what designs look like so that they can move on to the next stage in the approval process.”

2. Minority Report is Here: 3ds Max and Augmented Reality. 

“Traditionally, the way we export out of 3ds Max is through renderings, still image renderings, or animations and real-time rendering game engines,” Cortez says. “But what’s also emerging is a platform called augmented reality (AR) where we’re able to take 3D objects and superimpose them onto the real world, and you’re able to interact with these 3D objects in real time, similar to what you would see in movies like Minority Report or Avatar or Ironman.

“We’ve used AR on a few projects by embedding building information models [BIM] onto site plans. When your smartphone or tablet recognizes the page, models are overlaid on top, giving you a better understanding of the site design in 3D.

“This application also works on the job site. Our engineers recently went to Montana for a project and were able to access geo-located design models and superimpose them on the landscape. The value of this is that it allows for real-time collaboration with clients by letting them preview things that the designers are proposing. This leads to better decision-making during the design process.”

(For more on the future of augmented reality, check out Meta’s augmented reality–enabled glasses.)

3. Get Your Game Up:  Design and Visualization Skills. 

“Having a good foundation of the principles of design is key,” Cortez says. “Having a good eye in regards to composition, attention to detail. Being able to understand how to interpret floor plans, elevations, and cross-sections. And also, on the visualization side, being able to understand how timing in animated objects works. Understanding the way light behaves when it interacts with physical materials, and then having a good sense of organization and optimization of these virtual scenes.

“Say you have several lights hit a surface and bounce off of it, then hit a window and go through two or three different levels of glazing of the glass so that it reflects and refracts. Some of the light goes through, some of it bounces off and hits the ceiling, etc. If all of that calculation is taking place, it could take hours to render a frame of animation. Whereas if you optimize a scene and adjust the geometry and materials settings, you can balance the time versus the quality of the render, so it wouldn’t take that long — maybe just a fraction of that time — but still have an acceptable level of quality.”

Solutions Architect – Data Analytics – Core

Solutions Architect Data Analytics Core can seem overwhelming to newcomers, especially for those who are not familiar with the subject. To do the job right, you must be familiar with many terms, processes, standards, and concepts. This guide will assist you in solving problems and developing business cases to help improve your knowledge of this essential skill.

Solution architect – Data analytics – Core Review

The State of the CIO Report examines the current issues and concerns of CIOs. It also highlights the secrets and skills of highly innovative CIOs. Solution architects are experts in technology and business architecture. Solution architects usually have a defined project scope that defines the specific tasks and goals of the product.

A data analytics solution will only succeed if it has a good solution architect. The architect should be able to understand the company’s technological and business environments. He should be able to identify the problems facing the company and decide which solution is best. He should also be able design a solution that suits the needs of the company. Solution architects should be passionate about data analytics and be able explain the various concepts.

To create the best solution, a solution architect should be familiar with enterprise architecture. A company’s architecture is composed of several layers such as business processes, integration requirements and operating systems. An effective solution architect must also be familiar with the business model, operating system, and architectures. He must also have a good understanding of data models and business processes.

The solution architect must be able to identify the constraints and work with customers to resolve them. These credentials will enable the solution architect to prove that they have the qualifications to implement a specific technology.

Best Hashtags for photographers on Instagram

Some photographers believe that there is no need in the promotion and they should devote all their time to photography. However, you’ll be surprised when you learn about all the opportunities that social media has to offer. One of the most effective social networks for photographers is Instagram. You can sell your photos, attract clients, find sponsors and affiliates there regardless of your niche.

Why you should use hashtags

Moreover, Instagram refers your account to a special niche according to the hashtags you use.

It’s also a good opportunity for free advertising, as many pages feature photographers they like. There are thousands of such pages and they are devoted to different topics, so if you have an aim to be featured, keep working and they will post your images and mention your page in the description.

How to choose the right hashtags for Insta

We’ve already mentioned the importance of niche hashtags in the Guide to Instagram hashtags. Of course, you need to include different types of hashtags, however, niche hashtags would attract an audience that really cares about the content they find. So try to find as many niche hashtags as you can.

If you include only the most popular hashtags, your content would quickly disappear from the top and would attract bots and spammy pages. And it’s really hard to rank in the top results as you compete with pages with millions of followers.

How to get featured on a popular Instagram account

First, create a list of the accounts that feature photographers. Then start making photos that fit the style of these pages, add hashtags they use and tag their accounts. Don’t give up if it doesn’t work on the first try, keep going, be consistent and your pictures would definitely be featured.

Here are several accounts that feature photographers:

Best for Street Photography

@streetdreamsmag – 215k followers, hashtag – #streetdreamsmag
@streets_oftheworld – 6572 followers, hashtag – #streets_oftheworld
@streetlife_award – 26.4k followers, hashtag – #streetlife_award
@ig_street – 6915 followers, hashtag – #ig_street
@vivostreet – 1111 followers, hashtag – #vivostreet

Travel photography

@huntgramcuration – 19.4k followers, hashtag – #huntgram
@igshotz – 50.7k followers, hashtag – #igshotz –
@worldplaces – 133k followers, hashtag – #worldplaces
@instagood – 843k followers, hashtag – #instagoodmyphoto
@travelandlife – 220k followers, hashtag – #travelandlife

Wedding photography

@inspiredbythis – 187k followers, hashtag – #everydayIBT
@dreamweddingshots – 9011 followers, hashtag – #dreamweddingshots
@stylemepretty – 718k followers, hashtag – #SMPShareYourStory

Black and white

@world_shotz – 105k followers, hashtag – #theworldshotz_bnw
@blackandwhiteisworththefight – 134k followers, hashtag – #blackandwhiteisworththefight
@bnw_planet – 105k followers, hashtag – #bnw_planet
@flair_bw – 47.8k followers, hashtag – #flair_bw

Popular Hashtags for photographers

You can use online tools to find the right hashtags, such as Displaypurposes, Hashtagify or Hashtags.org. However, we decided to help you and selected the hashtags you can use depending on the photography style.

Photography

#photographyislife #photography #photographyeveryday #nikonphoto #photographyoftheday #agameoftones #photographyislifee #photographer #justgoshoot #ig_myshot #photographylover #master_shots #photographysouls #photographyprops #photographyoftheday #photographyaddict #photographylover #canon_photos #cpcollectives

Nature

#outdoors #hiking #trees #naturelover #wildlife #instanature #skyporn #cloudporn
#mothernature #landscape_lovers #nature_shooters #beautifulplaces #landscapelovers #welivetoexplore #awesome_earthpix #nature_seekers #landscapehunter #nature_shooters

Animals

#petsofinstagram #petstagram #instapet #weeklyfluff #petscorner #petoftheday #ilovemydog #puppylove #animalsofinstagram #dogsofig #catstagram #petsofig #cutepetclub #puppies #instapets #furbaby #instacat #animals #dogsofinstaworld #bestwoof #kitten #dog_features #catoftheday

Portraits

#portraitphotography #portraitmood #portraits_ig #portraitphotographer #makeportraits #portraitoftheday #portraitpage #rsa_portraits #bestportraits #portraitstyles_gf #ig_portrait #top_portraits #postmoreportraits #life_portraits #bestphotogram_portraits #pursuitofportraits #instagram_faces #profile_vision #featurepalette #discoverportrait #portraits_universe #ftmedd #2instagoodportraitlove #majestic_people #makeportrait #tangledinfilm

Street photography

#streetart #building #streetphoto #buildings #town #graffiti #architecturelovers #cities #architexture #lines #urbanart #archidaily #skyscraper #citylife #composition #archilovers #geometry #arts #streetlife #architectureporn #abstract #perspective #people #minimal #bnw #lookingup #road #geometric #photos #picture #everybodystreet #streetphoto_bw #lensculture #lensculturestreets #streetlife_award #urbanphotography #ig_street #streetview #street_photo_club #streets #streetphotography_bw #streetshot #SPiCollective #street_photography #magnumphotos #documentary #wearethestreet #streetportrait #beststreets #monochrome #hikaricreative #blackandwhitephotography #documentaryphotography #streetbwcolor #bnw_life #bnw

Astrophotography

#astrophotography #milkyway #astro_photography_ #nightscaper #astronomy #nightsky #nightscape #milkywaychasers #starrynight #natgeospace #astrophoto #stars #universetoday #milkywaygalaxy #longexposure #nightphotography #nightimages #nightshooters #ig_astrophotography #skymasters #space #stargazing #longexposure_shots #fs_longexpo #galaxy #longexpo #nightpics #rsa_night #longexpoelite #night_shooterz

Wedding photography

#weddingphotography #weddingplanner #weddinginspiration #weddingideas #greenweddingshoes #instawedding #theknot #bridal #destinationwedding #bridetobe #engaged #prewedding #junebugweddings #dugunfotografcisi #weddingplanning #brideandgroom #engagement #weddinginspo #instabride #destinationweddingphotographer #weddingstyle #stylemepretty #ido

Black and white

#bnw #bw #blackandwhitephotography #monochrome #bnw_society #bnw_captures #bnw_life #bw_lover #blackandwhitephoto #bnw_planet #monoart #blancoynegro #bw_photooftheday #noir #bw_society #instablackandwhite #igersbnw #monochromatic #bnw_demand #insta_bw #bnw_rose #bnw_globe #white #bw_crew #bnwmood #bwstyles_gf #noiretblanc #irox_bw #monotone #rsa_bnw

Fashion

#fashionshoot #fashionstudy #fashionoftheday #fashioneditorial #fashionphotographer #fashiontrends #fashionforward #fashions #fashionkilla #fashioninspiration #fashionkilla #fashionworld #fashioninspiration #editorialshoot #fashiontrends

These hashtags will help you with more reach, attract new followers and get featured on other accounts. However, don’t limit yourself only to these tags. Add location hashtags, geotag places, follow popular photographers and learn their ways of self-promotion.

Get more inspiration and ideas from some of the top photographers on Instagram, and dig into the ins and outs of social media and digital marketing for photographers.

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