3D visualisations for architecture are a necessary tool but at one point this can become an addiction. Here I am, blending a simple picture display for my living room wall. It’s true my husband is not an architect and it’s a good idea for him to have a clear image of what’s in my head before he starts hammering nails in the wall. But the hidden truth is that I just can’t help doing it.

Before moving into our new apartment last year, I modeled it and started virtually planning it. It was really useful, especially for areas like the kitchen.  It was an Ikea kitchen and the Ikea 3d planner is rather a good tool but the visualisation is not realistic and I wanted to convince my husband and myself on the color scheme so I used Blender.

Before Blender, although I already worked in archviz I never did 3d for my own personal stuff because I had a crappy work flow, modeling in autocad and then rendering in 3dmax. Well, it was not actually that bad, as the projects come to me in dwg format so it made sense to model them right there in the dwg file, but then I had to move a lot between software if I wanted to make changes to the model. So I didn’t like to waste time rendering personal stuff just for the fun of checking things out virtually first. After all, I can draw and measure on paper (I can I can!). Also, because I didn’t learn to model in max, I didn’t do organic type of modelling much and didn’t go into making furniture and interiors except generic ones using some standard libraries. And interiors were harder to pull off back then.  After switching to Blender, I had some trouble importing models from autocad at first, so I decided to learn to model with it, and my work flow improved so much that I started using 3d visualisations in a new way. If the modeling-rendering process is smooth and all in one place, visualising stops being the end result and becomes a part of the creative process. The grease pencil and the edge length are two Blender features that I started using more frequently. I am also starting to see that Cycles will increase this addiction with it’s real time previewing and stunning realism (btw, the image above with the TV area uses Cycles).

One thing I’m asking myself is whether this habit of wanting to see everything in 3d first before committing to it is not slowly taking away my ability to design and make design decisions when away from a computer. What do you think? It’s one of the things that makes me keep my kid away from technology as long as I will be able to.. and speaking of the kid…

The weirdest thing that happened was while getting some shelves on my girl’s bedroom wall. She is three and she caught me at my computer, making a quick render of her shelves.

Well, I felt it was easier to decide on the positioning of the shelves hidden behind my computer screen instead of trying them on the wall with her playing around and asking tons of questions 🙂 but this ended up with her looking over my shoulder.. or from under my elbow to be more accurate.. and asking for a different setup! So I had to make a new one to my little client specs, and with the new layout approved, daddy was allowed to get the shelves up (she also wanted to make sure she can reach them first :P)

So you know, kids have a tendency for neatly aligning and sorting stuff 🙂

The kids room is rendered with BI. One of this days I want to make a really nice kid room packed with toys image for the gallery!