2020 has brought many significant challenges, some of which Orban Design is well-prepared to help our clients overcome. Providing virtual walk-throughs of your project is a great way to keep ahead of the market and bring in interest and commitments. Take a look at the examples in this Vimeo folder of a set of virtual tours for an apartment building that is currently under construction. The developer will use these walkthroughs, as well as interior 360 panoramic renderings to showcase the project to prospective tenants.

This fall has been packed, with great projects all around. The first pair of images shows a proposed stone bridge that would be part of a new entrance road at a historic site. This rendering request came as a direct result of the success of my previous landscape project where I modeled a bridge and dam structure. I used Vray for Blender for this project as well, and I was very pleased with how the stonework came out in the 3D model.

I also had a few interior rendering projects. It seems most new floorplans are quite open, so there is a lot to show in terms of how the spaces flow from living room to dining room to kitchen and any connected outdoor spaces. I usually take several views to show the dynamic qualities of the spaces.

I’ve also been working on some larger scale developments. This next project is an exterior design of a multi-family residential complex that is being built in a location that requires city design review. I’ve been involved in generating 3D exterior views throughout the design and the review process. We are hopeful this will be the final iteration and the review process will be complete.

Last, but certainly not least, I’ve been working on a high-end mixed-use building project that included preparing a high-quality rendered walk-through of the lobby and the residential units. The following are some stills from the project, as well as a link to the marketing page where you can see the video. You can also view the video on my vimeo page.

I’ve been fortunate to work on some personally inspiring projects the past few months.

Starting off was a really sweet modern design for a large private residence. The design was done by an architect I’ve helped out with renderings on other similar projects. This time, instead of just a simple 3D massing study, I was tasked with making a more realistic rendering showing the site. The house sits up on the crest of a small hill, and the angles come from a responsed to two primary view sheds. I used V-ray proxies to be able to render the vegetation in 3D and give the image much greater realism. This was rendered in Sketchup, but I use Blender to bring in the trees and make the V-ray proxies that I can then bring in to Sketchup.

The next design I worked on was a floating semi-spiral stair that I helped design for a local design-build firm. I was given the general configuration then looked at how to make the geometry fit the space and options for how to detail the pieces. This is a house I’ve been drafting the blueprints for as well, plus have done exterior 3D studies throughout the course of the project.

I’ve finally gotten back to doing some computer generated video, this time doing a set of fly-over animations of three apartment projects in DC that are currently under construction. For these, I took the Sketchup models I’d already completed when I did the exterior renderings, and brought them into Blender. I find Sketchup is very limited in the ability to control animation, as it uses a very basic interpolation between still scenes, which gives the camera a sort of yo-yo feel where it bounces between the keyframes. With Blender I can draw a smooth curved path for the camera to follow. Fortunately, the developer of Blender for V-ray has done a great job with the program, and I was able to easily set up the model for rendering. I’m really pleased with how these came out.

A wildflower meadow was my task for this last project. Again, I used the Sketchup to Blender workflow to bring this into Blender for rendering with V-ray. With Blender particle physics, and vray proxies, I was able to render out an entire field of flowers in full 3D (I added in some people in Photoshop later to give a bit of scale.) I’m so grateful for the technological tools that allow for basically unlimited artistic expression!

Here is a new video I prepared for the proposed Culpeper Butterfly development. This project was in collaboration with Don Swofford.

I prepared the 3D model of the project, generated the animation, and composited the video presentation. The flythrough was prepared for the client’s presentation in front of the planning commission. The project won unanimous approval from the county.

The culmination of my work on this Georgetown mansion marketing material is a flythrough animation I prepared over the past few weeks. Special thanks to Jeremy at
RenderSolve who helped to generate the few thousand frames of the animation on their render farm. This was done in Vray for Blender, using the same model that I’ve been working on over the past few months, see additional renderings of the project here and here.