Are renderings important?

There have been mixed thoughts on these types of visuals. The use of AI has made some drastic changes to our industry as designers. Many of us feel that is will take the creativity out of the industry. Leaving the necessity of a professional in question. My thought on this is that AI generations are not going to take the place of having someone with experience help you through a very important change or upgrade to your most valuable asset, your home. Although we use visual aids as a tool, they are not taking the place of the valuable advice and experience that a design team will supply.

In our specific studio we do use every tool in our toolbox to move our industry forward and give clients an unmatched experience. This has meant that we have to continually update our skill set to meet the current expectations of our potential clients. When I started out in this industry most of my presentations were done with hand sketches and cut outs from magazines…something we barely refer to now :) I still love the art of the pencil and rendering marker days. There is really a select few that have the ability to hand draw. That being said, we have moved away from those days of presenting in this manner for a few reasons. Although beautiful, our hand drawings could at times take many revisions meaning MANY sheets of large scale paper, and lots of whiteout! As of late most of our presentations are digital. We present in our studio on a large screen, making it easy for everyone to see all the details without the printouts. We use the most updated programs to comprise our details and give the client a visual as close as possible to their final outcome as we can. This is something as a seasoned designer I work to keep up with. Using rendering programs in conjunction with our technical drawings has turned out to be an immensely valuable tool.

There is a great number of people not in this industry that can not visual when looking at a two dimensional drawing. I have often caught clients looking at technical plans with a puzzled look on their faces while trying their best to get their bearings in a space. Enter 3D designs…our new best friend. Although these are an extra step in the process, I can not imagine my process without them. The 3D drawing is very different the AI generated visual. A rendering generated from a technical drawing has all the proper scale, dimension and time put into it by your designer as the black and white plan. The ability for us to use this visual aid to input things such as your specific furniture, millwork and paint colours is invaluable. Taking the guesswork out for the client. We always hear “it looks exactly like the rendering!” on completion of our projects. This is something that brings another level of comfort as well as excitement to a project.

So do we feel renderings are important…in most cases, yes! We love this tool and will continue to grow our skills as new things become available to professionals in our field.