2D vs 3D
Everyone knows the difference between 2D and 3D. When watching The Simpsons, people can tell when they're seeing 2D Homer vs 3D Homer. Most people can also figure out 2D. People can pull up a map and reasonably figure out where they are in relation to nearby towns and geographic features. Likewise, most people can draw simple maps for others to follow. But when 3D enters the picture, for some reason, some people, even those that have power to deny building projects based on architectural drawings, have difficulty visualizing and presenting unbuilt space in three dimensions.
In 3D perspectives, heights drop off with distance. Intuitively, we know this. When we see a building with a flat roof run into the distance, the roof line runs down as if shrinking, even though we know from experience that the roof line is flat. If captured on paper, the lines run down toward what's called "vanishing points" on the horizon.
In architecture, we frequently draw building elevations, which are 2D representations of a face of a building. They are, by design, flat so one can easily measure distances between features on the face of a wall, something that isn't easily done in a perspective drawing. Like a map, it can be difficult to tell what parts are coming forward and what parts are dropping back, without other information like contours for a map or a floor plan for an elevation. Those trained to read these drawings can piece the information together from an architectural set fairly easily, but as architects, we try to make the plans as easily read as possible so for presentation purposes, we'll add shadow and color, which adds depth to the drawings. However, while elevations are extremely useful in explaining how a building will be put together, it is technically impossible to ever see an elevation in real life as it's drawn. The closest you can ever get is to stand several miles away and look at the building through super telephoto lens. At those distances, the perspective lines may be parallel enough to see an image close to an elevation drawing. Of course, this would never be done.
For that reason, we often times will also provide perspective renderings to communicate our ideas to the public and city officials in a format they more easily relate to: what they see every day from their own eyes. Given modern technology, we will take the designed floor plans and elevations, and put them into a 3D modeling program to generate these views. They will often times be at eye level along a street sidewalk or something similar to simulate what a person would actually see walking down the street at a project. Given 3D modeling programs, we can, today, get the perspectives to be extremely accurate.
For one project in the East Bay, we did exactly this. We modeled our project and rendered a view from the street of a busy thoroughfare. The project consisted of three story townhouses and one raised floor historic house, which actually wasn't supposed to be retained as a historic house, but was actually just a high level government official's pet project. But that's a different story. The historic house was situated along the street and there was a townhouse behind it. We did what we could in mitigating this tension between a new three story townhouse and a raised one story historic house that was suddenly thrust upon us after we had already designed the townhouses. We placed the townhouses as far away from the historic house as possible, included landscape screening, and stepped the three story townhouse down to two floors at the areas closest to the historic house in attempt to respect the scale as much as possible.
The result was modeled in 3D and the relationships between the different buildings were dead on accurate. The city did want us to show the entire breadth of the site so we did have to use a wider angle perspective, which skews the lines somewhat, but the final result is still accurate as to what one would see in real life. In the city council meeting to approve or deny the project, a couple decided that our model, accurate to the inch, was not accurate enough. This couple, from what I was told, shows up at every council meeting to speak against any development whatsoever. They decided that the best way to take us down was to argue that the three story townhouse was too tall and too foreboding in comparison to the historic house that not even many of the council members thought should have been deemed historic. So they took our perspective drawing, Photoshopped out the three story townhouse behind it, and put in our elevation drawing in its place. As a result, the perspective dropoff was gone. They scaled the elevation drawing based on a distance at the rear of the house instead of where the actual townhouse would be. So of course, it looked completely looming on the single story house. That's the weirdness that results when you put two drawings in completely different dimensions into the same picture.
Unfortunately, I cannot show you the two images here, but I created a very quick massing model to illustrate the difference. The top image is roughly what we modeled. The dimensions are not the same as what was built, but still shows the difference. Note how the three story townhouse drops off in the distance, just like it would in real life. The bottom image shows what the couple did. They took the elevation drawing from the architectural set and Photoshopped it into the perspective. It should be pretty obvious to most that the elevation changes the orientation of the building from reality and that the image they presented would be impossible to see in real life.
"That's okay. No one is stupid enough to believe that anyway," I thought to myself.
Sure enough, the biggest anti-growth council member held up the contrived drawing and exclaimed how shocking it is to see what it will actually look like and proceeded to vote no on the project. Thankfully the project still passed by a margin of one, but this is the level of intelligence that holds the power to pass or deny a project based on what it will look like? Really?
10/3/18 edit: The project has since been completed and unsurprisingly, reality most closely resembles our 3D rendering, and not the contrived image held up at city council. It is doubtful that either the resident or the city council member will bother to even look at the finished homes or have any moment of self reflection on this.
In 3D perspectives, heights drop off with distance. Intuitively, we know this. When we see a building with a flat roof run into the distance, the roof line runs down as if shrinking, even though we know from experience that the roof line is flat. If captured on paper, the lines run down toward what's called "vanishing points" on the horizon.
In architecture, we frequently draw building elevations, which are 2D representations of a face of a building. They are, by design, flat so one can easily measure distances between features on the face of a wall, something that isn't easily done in a perspective drawing. Like a map, it can be difficult to tell what parts are coming forward and what parts are dropping back, without other information like contours for a map or a floor plan for an elevation. Those trained to read these drawings can piece the information together from an architectural set fairly easily, but as architects, we try to make the plans as easily read as possible so for presentation purposes, we'll add shadow and color, which adds depth to the drawings. However, while elevations are extremely useful in explaining how a building will be put together, it is technically impossible to ever see an elevation in real life as it's drawn. The closest you can ever get is to stand several miles away and look at the building through super telephoto lens. At those distances, the perspective lines may be parallel enough to see an image close to an elevation drawing. Of course, this would never be done.
For that reason, we often times will also provide perspective renderings to communicate our ideas to the public and city officials in a format they more easily relate to: what they see every day from their own eyes. Given modern technology, we will take the designed floor plans and elevations, and put them into a 3D modeling program to generate these views. They will often times be at eye level along a street sidewalk or something similar to simulate what a person would actually see walking down the street at a project. Given 3D modeling programs, we can, today, get the perspectives to be extremely accurate.
For one project in the East Bay, we did exactly this. We modeled our project and rendered a view from the street of a busy thoroughfare. The project consisted of three story townhouses and one raised floor historic house, which actually wasn't supposed to be retained as a historic house, but was actually just a high level government official's pet project. But that's a different story. The historic house was situated along the street and there was a townhouse behind it. We did what we could in mitigating this tension between a new three story townhouse and a raised one story historic house that was suddenly thrust upon us after we had already designed the townhouses. We placed the townhouses as far away from the historic house as possible, included landscape screening, and stepped the three story townhouse down to two floors at the areas closest to the historic house in attempt to respect the scale as much as possible.
The result was modeled in 3D and the relationships between the different buildings were dead on accurate. The city did want us to show the entire breadth of the site so we did have to use a wider angle perspective, which skews the lines somewhat, but the final result is still accurate as to what one would see in real life. In the city council meeting to approve or deny the project, a couple decided that our model, accurate to the inch, was not accurate enough. This couple, from what I was told, shows up at every council meeting to speak against any development whatsoever. They decided that the best way to take us down was to argue that the three story townhouse was too tall and too foreboding in comparison to the historic house that not even many of the council members thought should have been deemed historic. So they took our perspective drawing, Photoshopped out the three story townhouse behind it, and put in our elevation drawing in its place. As a result, the perspective dropoff was gone. They scaled the elevation drawing based on a distance at the rear of the house instead of where the actual townhouse would be. So of course, it looked completely looming on the single story house. That's the weirdness that results when you put two drawings in completely different dimensions into the same picture.
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| Quick, abstracted model to illustrate a rendering that models reality (top) and the same version "Picassoed" to some alternate reality by anti-growthers (bottom). |
Unfortunately, I cannot show you the two images here, but I created a very quick massing model to illustrate the difference. The top image is roughly what we modeled. The dimensions are not the same as what was built, but still shows the difference. Note how the three story townhouse drops off in the distance, just like it would in real life. The bottom image shows what the couple did. They took the elevation drawing from the architectural set and Photoshopped it into the perspective. It should be pretty obvious to most that the elevation changes the orientation of the building from reality and that the image they presented would be impossible to see in real life.
"That's okay. No one is stupid enough to believe that anyway," I thought to myself.
Sure enough, the biggest anti-growth council member held up the contrived drawing and exclaimed how shocking it is to see what it will actually look like and proceeded to vote no on the project. Thankfully the project still passed by a margin of one, but this is the level of intelligence that holds the power to pass or deny a project based on what it will look like? Really?
10/3/18 edit: The project has since been completed and unsurprisingly, reality most closely resembles our 3D rendering, and not the contrived image held up at city council. It is doubtful that either the resident or the city council member will bother to even look at the finished homes or have any moment of self reflection on this.
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