Despite the pandemic, the pace of construction and design seems to continue unabated, thankfully one of the bright spots of the economy. As folks are using their homes much more, I have also found an increase in the number of inquiries for design services for renovations and new construction. My proportion of work between 3D renderings and permit drawings has noticeably shifted towards the latter compared to previous years.

Many of the projects that I prepare drawings for I also have the opportunity to prepare 3D models of the architecture to assist with making design decisions and to understand the 2D drawings. The following images are projects where I also prepared working drawings up to permit/ pricing sets for my clients.

Other work shown below are renderings for various clients: owners; builders; real estate agents; developers. I am pleased with the relationships I have developed and maintained over the years, and here’s to many more exciting projects in the new year.

The release of the new version 3 of V-Ray for Sketchup has taken a bit of effort to incorporate into my workflow. There are many changes in how V-Ray handles materials the net effect of which has made large swathes of my existing models obsolete. On the one hand, the render engine that uses video card rendering has been substantially upgraded, which makes for fast renders. On the other hand, the workflow changes have been most pronounced in this method of rendering. The massing study image above is the first project for which I’ve actually used the latest V-Ray for Sketchup.

The image below is a photo-realistic view of a commercial project that I had rendered previously in a watercolor style.

Conceptual interior renderings of a proposed shared office space in an existing building.

Exterior renderings of a small-footprint development within Lochlyn rendered with Vray for Blender.

I’ve been keeping quite busy rendering the new projects going in at the Burnett Commons area on Elliott Avenue. This latest render is for a new apartment building the will be built West of the current Burnett entrance.

The renderings below are for a development proposal to show the potential use of a property that is currently a parking lot. The cut-away rendering shows the potential for structured parking under the building.

The store interior is for helping a client visualize a potential retail fit-out in an existing space, using the preferred palette of interior materials and finishes.

The shed rendering shows the location and design of a proposed structure in the yard. I prepared many iterations of this rendering to show different material options and post and beam configurations.

A night shot of a previously rendered project was requested by the client to use for marketing.

A spare palette of exterior cladding was used to render this residential project proposed for an ocean-view property in Maine.

This is the final iteration of the site development rendering for the former city parcel on Elliott Avenue. You can see an earlier version I did here. Besides that early one, I had also prepared two other versions before this final one, so it’s nice to see this project breaking ground and getting closer to reality. These images will be used for marketing, and for a jobsite sign. Stop by and look!

For those interested in the rendering aspect of this project, I used SketchUp (SU) and Vray for SketchUp version 2.0 to create the renderings. I made use of the proxy feature to insert hundreds of high-polygon count trees on the site, which would be impossible with native SU. Despite the memory savings there, I still had to break the rendering into a foreground model and a background model as the file was still too large for SU to handle and export to rendering. If you look carefully, you can see some of the 3D models of downtown Charlottesville I added into the rendering. I found they were not the cleanest models or textures, they required some extensive cleanup just to be able to open at all in SU. I was very impressed overall how Vray was able to handle the heavy model I threw at it. It has come a long way since the last version!