ARCHITECTURE SPECIAL Page 2

How do you convince a hard-nosed local planning officer to let you put an extra storey on your office or apartment development! - read on!

Phil Voas may be contacted at
phillip.voas@ewa.co.uk

NOW YOU SEE IT. As part of our Special Feature Mike McNamee interviews architectural technician, Phil Voas of EWA Architects Ltd.

1. While the concept drawings used to be pen & ink or watercolour, today they are as likely to be prepared using simple primitives and a 3-D design pakage. Computer generated "walk arounds" have to some extent taken the place of solid models.

2. The complex engineering drawing is created in AutoCAD and transferred to 3D Studio Max (3DS). Note the individual elements are colour coded to their own layer for keeping track of them. Here for example, all the windows and glass are yellow.

3. The skeleton outline of the building can be rendered or skinned from a cladding library. Here we show grey brick, red brick and white painted wood as examples. Note that masonry blocks run around the windows, preserving the coursing of the joints. Without the glass cladding we can still see inside the building.

4. The rendered building is ready for placement into the actual scene.

5. The 3DS camera angles are set using co-ordinates from the Ordnance Survey and site survey.

6. In Photoshop now, the building is placed in the scene and on the right the matching Alpha Channel is available as a mask. This will later be used to control the placement of reflections in the windows.

7. The perspective lines and camera angles must be very accurate for convincing reality of the virtual building.

8. The new building in its surroundings, including computer generated people, cars and trees. The new sky has been masked

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There are 227 days to get ready for the SWPP Convention and Trade Show at The Hilton London Metropole Hotel ...
which starts on Tuesday 8th January 2013

Photo Quote: It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter. - Alfred Eisenstaedt