3D Style and Architectural Illustration
3D Style illustrations can be used for everything from product concepts to architectural views and storytelling. People are drawn to the clean lines and over perfection of 3D rendered views. Unfortunately over–perfect is less–than–real.
Realism is imperfection. A bathroom scene shows signs of use,
towels are rumpled
Product rendered image: untextured, textured
The hyper perfect image is also less than hospitable to the necessities of interaction design and usability. You quickly notice when humans have been removed from the architectural view’s clean lines. Or that an interior is magazine layout perfect. Humans are not welcome.
A good first step is to give you the feeling that someone does indeed “live” in the scene. Towels get rumpled. Trash cans get spilled. Old exteriors have rust. All is not tucked into place, neatly and precisely but scattered about as if in use.
When you’re selling products, you’re thinking about how your product works on the store shelf. Consumers are looking at the product in a different context, like crowding one more product around the edge of a sink. It’s often useful to stage products within the context they will be used.
Architectural view, exterior. For a refurbished company suite
design concept for the warehouse district (3D rendered interior below)
To foster a different mindset, exercise balls provide active seating
replacing chairs, gargoyle statuary provides an innovative multipurpose
furniture system—complete with tiered shelving
The design crux of rendering objects in 3D is detail versus rendering time. A complex scene can take as long for the computer to display onscreen (render) as it did to build in the first place. Even with modern hardware, it can take days of computer processing to finish a single image. With all that work involved, it makes little sense to leave human figures out of the scence. Especially today, with dedicated software designed to specifically model and render the human figure.
Some 3D programs specialize in
rendering human figures
Illustrating 3D design concepts, you can take staples of interaction design such as personas and storyboards even further by figuring out the clothing your persona would wear in a situation.
I was observing the users doing a ‘bar hunt’ before a meeting could start. The building was designed by a famous architect. As I watched, they would stand on chairs, perch their wireless devices atop bookshelves, all to get better wireless signal without having to leave the building. Not a situation you could see in the fancy architectural illustrations which use human figures merely to indicate scale.
Improving Architectural Illustration with Persona Power
The new thermostat comes from the factory with 56 different temperature defaults: four a day, seven days a week, for both heating and cooling. Instead of a single setting that consumers could vary to suit themselves, the programmers force everyone to start by dealing with 56 choices. That’s not a feature. It’s a monster bug.
—Rising Heat By Virginia Postrel
Rendering humans for the scene is a special challenge all its own. However, it’s vital to show, for example, the building’s users will be able to operate the termostat and other human factors run smoothly.
There is absolutely no reason not to develop personas and storyboard for the users architects have to satisfy and even delight. Interaction design provides the tools, with captology and desirability design offering some vital insights.
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- Bad Designs has lots of examples of good looking architectural details which confuse users: Doors users can’t operate, Parking, walkways, controls in conference rooms, elevators. Again, you never see architectural illustrations showing befuddled users encountering their first destination–based elevator control.
- Why bad design of sidewalks results in lots of “keep off the grass” signs. Smart designers “…waited for the first winter and photographed where people made paths in the snow between the buildings.”
- In Rising Heat, Virginia Postrel offers blunt insight “My new thermostat was designed by brilliant morons.”
- Architecture and interaction design, via adaptation and hackability brings up the idea of how interaction design can support hackability. More and more, consumers are repurposing products from Ikea to companies like Dell see supporting hackability as moving beyond customer centricity.
- Peters explains “Among other things, such research led me to argue that the management of physical space is one of the most powerful tools that a boss has. There’s a ton of evidence, including my own research, that demonstrates, for instance, that intermingling project teammates from various functions is an astonishingly potent device for increasing project effectiveness. (Incidentally, I believe this is just about as true in the “virtual–electronic communication age” as it ever was.)”