Visualization often starts with something not visual at all—with words, concepts, objectives and parameters that typically come in the form of discussion and written narrative. This raw material is sketched and refined, and a final design starts to take shape. Whether it's a master plan, feasibility study, program, concept design or rendering, CRSA can help guide your vision forward.
Diagrams and massing models are among the first visuals created in the life of a project. These visualizations highlight how a building works in theory, and the big ideas it is trying to address. They often look nothing like the final product but are important tools to set the project in the right direction, and to make sure major project drivers like site constraints and overall sizing are addressed. Diagrams commonly use basic shapes and arrows to give an idea of future volumes and relationships.
Concept sketches are about quickly exploring a variety of ideas. This is where an idea starts looking like an actual building, but this stage is purposely kept loose and imprecise.
In design, each component of a project affects other components. As a result, the decision-making process is iterative and often requires many attempts. Sketches are a tool that can both produce ideas quick enough to allow exploration, but are accurate enough to provide useful information to guide further iterations.
As a project begins to take shape, focus moves from overall form to the details of materials and building elements. This phase takes into consideration site context, project budget, available materials, and design standards to answer questions about roofs, walls, doors, windows and other architectural components. Images from this stage can often be taken right from the model and are thus quick and easy to produce.
Once an idea has been refined and fleshed out, the underlying model can be used to produce final images. The process of turning a raw model into a final image is called rendering. This process is much like photography, and involves the placing of lights and cameras, and composition of figures and other real-world objects like cars and furniture (called “entourage”) to help add believability to the scene.
This phase often aims toward photo-realism to most accurately convey an idea but can also be presented more abstractly if needed.
