Until very recently, paper and pen were the primary tools architects used to develop designs and produce construction documentation. Draftsmen hunched over pen and paper, armed with t-squares and scales. Meticulously pouring over lines, dots, and hatches all while visualizing the entire space in their mind’s eye. For the average client, the only three-dimensional glimpse into the spatial qualities of their building-to-be was a single sketch, two if they were lucky. This principle sketch, usually in watercolor, took the artist months of toiling to produce. A rendering.
Enter Autocad in 1982. Computer Aided Design (CAD) replaced the pen and t-square with mouse and keyboard for many architects, providing freedom from the physical burdens of sketching by hand. Lineweights became linestyles and layers replaced stacks of tracing paper. What once took months of hand drawing instruments of service with no margin for error, designs could now be developed, reviewed, and revised digitally.
At the same time, advances in steel and concrete, and eventually curtain wall systems fuelled a global race to build taller, deeper, and wider. From Stonehenge to the Tower of Babel to the Empire State Building, those with power, influence, and military might used advancements in architecture and construction to showcase their dominance. It’s no coincidence that the height of a nation’s tallest tower often mirrored its economic strength and global standing.
Printing shifted the focus of line weights and line types to reproducibility. Once the lines were drawn and the design was set, artists could use the drawings as inspiration to create three-dimensional perspectives, essentially a coloring exercise in interpretation. While rendering still took time, what had once taken months was now reduced to days. A bit of mailing back and forth between artist and client, like patrons of the past commissioning a symphony, was all it took for renderings to arrive within days. In the process, the artist’s imagination and inspiration were diluted, simplified down to a coloring exercise.
BIM entered the world rather discreetly, a natural evolution from CAD. Instead of drawing individual lines, the entire building was now being constructed at real-life scale, with the ability to cut sections and perspectives anywhere one desired to extract spatial data at a moment’s notice. We are modeling in 3D rather than drawing in 2D. We are coordinating entire cities before a single grain of sand has moved on site, all while projecting sunlight, visibility, costs, and even planetary impact.
Clients gradually realized the value of visualizing the project in 3D before a shovel ever hit the ground, making design decisions with the architect early, before the design veered too far in one direction, and reducing risk from miscoordination between trades working in silos. Real time rendering quickly became essential for the survival of architectural offices. Those who held the trade secret, the ability to wow clients and sell their vision, outpaced the competition by embracing the Daft Punk ethos: harder, better, faster, stronger.
Counterbalancing the time required to produce renderings against ongoing design development was an impossible task, until real-time rendering engines emerged to answer the call. With the click of a button, the BIM model could be transformed into a client-friendly perspective viewport of the architect’s imagination. The ability to navigate the BIM models in first person view, equipped with realistic materials and sunlight in real time, greatly shortened the gap between the architect’s vision and the client’s understanding of architectural drawings. Instead of recieving a single perspective of the principle space, clients could now explore the entire project in Virtual Reality, viewing it from every angle ad nauseum, the hallmark of contemporary real-time rendering.
In Part 2, we’ll explore the leading real-time rendering tools in the AEC industry and how rendering has shifted from a specialized skill to an accessible tool for everyone.