Since architects can be just as demanding as motion picture animators in terms of the levels of quality they desire from their renderings, the choice was made to incorporate mental ray into Autodesk VIZ. “Sure, it’s a shader-based language, and it’s very complicated,” states Campbell, “but we actually found a way to present it to architects so that it was useful to them. And now they’re finding that they can get larger renderings and more fidelity out of their renderings because of the technology that was developed only for the film industry.”

Campbell explains that the fundamental difference in architectural usage is in the sales process. “It’s all a part of getting the buy off in the customer’s mind. The closer it [the rendering] is to reality and the closer It actually looks to how it [the structure] will look when it’s actually built makes them see the light a whole lot faster. And this can include trees blowing in the wind, and people walking through buildings and fountains outside with water gushing out. And even for taking a million dollar mill you want to build and visualizing it within the factory of a client, you really get it when you see a great visualization. It’s something you can interact with. You can say, ‘Hey, what’s it look like from over there? And what if the lights are blue?’”

Autodesk VIZ is used for design visualization while Discreet’s 3ds max and combustion fill the need for motion-picture-quality 3D content. Courtesy of Autodesk® VIZ/Discreet.

Kohn Pedersen Fox’s strong body of work has earned the firm recognition as one of the most respected architectural design firms in the world. KPF has been the recipient of numerous awards recognizing their wide range of design and technical accomplishments. Its varied projects for clients in both the public and private sectors have included design and planning on such facilities as IBM World Headquarters, Capital Cities/ABC Headquarters, the Shanghai World Financial Center, Munich Airport, Philadelphia International Airport and the World Trade Center Redevelopment to name but a very few.

Thomas Brown, design technologies manager at KPF, points out how Discreet’s software has given his firm a competitive advantage when it comes to client presentations. “KPF chose Discreet 3ds max and combustion software to give us a design tool to allow us to explore our designs in a way that is consistent with our vision, the competitive advantage when helping our clients and new business prospects visualize their project, and giving them great insight into what our talented architects and designers can do.”

There are also practical aspects to design visualization software other than client presentation. “Any project will benefit from having design visualization,” Campbell says, “but it certainly becomes important when you have complex buildings or projects that are on very sensitive sites, where, for instance, the community is very concerned about how tall a building is and how large a shadow it’s going to cast on adjacent structures. Or, if you’ve got unusual geometry like Frank Gerry’s architecture. It’s becoming so commonplace these days that almost every project that’s being proposed is presented with visualization software. You almost never see water color and pencil sketches any more.”

Like 3ds max, combustion is another outgrowth of the film industry that allows a designer to make alterations without totally re-rendering. “combustion is a very mature workflow that enables you to compartmentalize your renders so that you do not have to re-render the whole thing when you want to make a change,” Campbell explains. “Let’s say, for example, I wanted to take one particular building and change the material on it slightly. Well, using combustion with either Autodesk VIZ or 3ds max, I’m able to keep my background plate as it is. I’m able to keep the other buildings I’ve got in the compound already rendered, and re-render that one building only and comp it back into the rendering.” combustion will work seamlessly with either 3ds max or VIZ.