With the kick off of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Convention in Chicago (June 10-12), Discreet announced that leading architectural firms are using its design visualization offerings for a competitive advantage in winning new commissions and securing approval for high-profile design concepts, including Perkins & Will, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, Kohn Pederson Fox, Ellerbe Becket and Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum.
Accomplished designers from these firms employ a range of design visualization solutions from Autodesk and Discreet. Autodesk VIZ is used for design concept exploration, photorealistic renderings and fly-through animations. Discreets 3ds max and combustion software is used for professional, motion-picture-quality 3D content when artists wish to create advanced 3D animations incorporating sophisticated character animation, environmental forces (such as gravity and wind); sub-object animation (for life-like actions from curtains swaying in the breeze to an earthquake simulation); and event-driven particles that mimic environmental effects (rain, snow, dense fog, fountains, fluid surfaces) with stunning realism for maximum wow-factor client presentations.
Utilizing their investment in Autodesk and Discreet solutions, these firms have designed some of the worlds most monumental and award-winning buildings, including the Sears Tower, Trump Tower, New Yorks Museum of Modern Art, Londons Natural History Museum, IBM World Headquarters, Sothebys Worldwide Headquarters, and buildings at Yale University and the University of Chicago.
These world-renowned architectural firms are able to leverage the data they create with the family of Autodesk solutions, including Autodesk Revit, Autodesk Architectural Desktop, AutoCAD and Autodesk VIZ software products, as well as the Autodesk Buzzsaw service, all complemented by the film-quality animation and compositing effects possible from the Discreet division of Autodesk, with 3ds max and combustion for cinematic-quality 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, giving them great insight into what our talented architects and designers can do," said Thomas Brown, design technologies manager at KPF. "We are able to help our clients really visualize design options with Discreet's 3ds max software with a quality of light and expression that best represents our vision, and then take it into combustion compositing software, where we can add painted textures, motion graphics or particle tweaks to the design to further enhance our presentations without having to re-render. This saves us a tremendous amount of time and allows us to explore different design options with the client, options we wouldn't be able to present without using 3ds max and combustion."
Discreets professional production software perfectly complements Autodesk VIZ 2005 -- a 3D modeling, rendering and presentation software that provides state-of-the-art image creation technologies for communicating and sharing design intent. Design professionals use Autodesk VIZ throughout the design process to develop and explore concepts and alternatives; communicate design intent to clients, colleagues and consultants; and validate design strategies. Autodesk VIZ software accommodates multiple levels of visual representation, from realtime studies to photorealistic virtual prototypes to compelling multimedia presentations.
Architectural customers benefit by utilizing the professional design visualization tools from Autodesk and Discreet throughout each stage of the design process from mock-ups and photorealistic renderings with Autodesk VIZ 2005 to adding very life-like walkthroughs of building proposals with 3D animated characters, particle tools and physics that represent water, cloth, elements and flow of a structure with Discreet 3ds max software, said Paul Lypaczewski, gm, Discreet, and evp, Autodesk Inc. Both of these solutions from Autodesk and Discreet allow our customers clients to immerse themselves into a space virtually before committing to a plan. Whether by integrating 3D buildings into live-action footage that helps city commissions and other officials approve building plans or by demonstrating how great crowds of people will move through a structure, 3ds max gives our clients a valuable, account-winning edge.
Discreets (www.discreet.com) award-winning solutions are designed for digital media creation, management and delivery across all disciplines from film and television visual effects, color grading and editing to animation, game development, Web/interactive and design visualization. Montreal-based Discreet is a division of Autodesk Inc. (www.autodesk.com), the leading design and digital media creation, management and distribution company.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
