Now there are tasks that you cannot avoid doing at a practice that will cause you to hate your job. And then there are tasks that you can ple­a­santly avoid in order to make your life a lot easier. One of these tasks that you should try to avoid at all costs is 3D rendering.

It sounds like blasphemy really. Most people these days will gra­duate from their univer­sity with a gre­a­ter knowledge of 3D model­ling soft­ware than their knowledge of Auto­CAD. I really didn’t believe that this could ever be the case but its true. I can say first hand that some fri­ends straight out of such scho­ols as Yale, Prin­ce­ton, Colum­bia and Sci­Arc knew nothing about Auto­CAD. While this may give you a heads up at Gehry’s office, it doesn’t help you in the overwhel­ming majo­rity of firms that you will work in.

Here are 12 Rea­sons why your should avoid ren­de­ring in your office at all costs.

1. You Will Lose Track of Time:

You can really get lost in your model­ling. A whole work day can go by without you even rea­lizing it. Worst of all, you can spend hours on a task that you expec­ted to take a half an hour. In the end, you will find your­self staying later into the night while your coworkers punch out at 6.

2. More Demands on Your Time

There seems to be a very unfair expectation that employers have on the amount of time that it takes to complete a digi­tal model. I have seen employers con­si­s­tently assign a brand new 3D model to be comple­ted and ren­de­red for print in a two day period. While that may not seem like a short amount of time, we can easily forget that a con­si­de­rable amount of time is going to be spent twea­king the van­tage points and mate­ri­als. Also, the employer will ine­vi­tably be reques­ting changes to the design or look once they see your pro­gress prints.

3. The Employer Doesn’t Have Knowledge of the Software

There in lies maybe the biggest pro­blem. Most of your super­vi­sors will be older and have not been per­so­nally expo­sed to model­ling soft­ware. They often feel as though compu­ters have made things more instant or auto­ma­ted, when the truth of the mat­ter is that compu­ters have really just compli­ca­ted things.

So as men­ti­o­ned above, the employer will give you these assign­ments and con­stantly make changes to the model before you are done. Often times, the changes that they request will require near full remo­dels, so they can really be det­ri­men­tal to get­ting ren­de­rings complete. This brings me to my next point

4. You Will Find Your­self Re-doing Things Over and Over

As you pre­sent vari­ous sche­mes and changes to your cli­ents, you will find that you will have to model the same things over and over again. It is not unusual to have to go through 3–5 diffe­rent drawing files in one day.

5. You Have to Sweat the Details

Aside from actually con­structing the forms that make up the buil­ding mas­sing, you also need to con­cen­t­rate on those tedi­ous details. Reflections, sha­ding, mate­rial colors, mul­li­ons… you name it, are all items that must be coor­di­na­ted into your ren­de­ring in order for it to come off as a believable form. Cli­ents have little capa­city for ima­gi­nation and you really need to paint as clear of a picture as possi­ble. The details are going to take up most of your time.

6. You Are On Your Own: No One Else Can Help You

Unfor­tu­na­tely, digi­tal models practi­cally have indivi­dual signa­tu­res embed­ded into them. What I mean is that it is easy to tell that one per­son modelled one drawing and ano­ther per­son was the author of ano­ther. When you are pre­sen­ting mul­tiple sche­mes, the same per­son really needs to be deve­loping each one. It is the only way to deliver a pro­fes­si­o­nal pre­sen­tation to a cli­ent. This means that none of your colle­a­gues can help you out with the work load.

7. You May Have Knowledge in One Soft­ware But Not Another

There are so many diffe­rent 3D soft­ware out there. I could name nearly ten of them but there are con­stantly new pro­grams coming out that trump the others. I per­so­nally was used to using Formz when I came out of school. My first firm used 3D Stu­dio Max and expec­ted me to hit the ground running. I ended up having to learn the new interface while trying to keep up with my assign­ments. This led to longer nights at work that I would have rather spent back home of at happy hour.

8. You Lose Your Per­so­nal Space

Because your boss will be wan­ting to make those changes, he is basi­cally going to be sit­ting on your lap and pun­ching holes in your LCD screen. They just get sucked into your compu­ter screen while you are still sit­ting at your desk! They will be put­ting their faces 3 inches away from your screen so they can inspect your work and you will most likely get fami­liar with the smell of their bre­ath. To make mat­ters worst, they will just stand there while you are fran­ti­cally making their changes, even though it may take you 10 minu­tes to do so. You really just have to sit there and take it because its hard to tell your boss to buzz off.

9. You Won’t Be Working on Impor­tant Tasks

So while you are making pretty pictu­res, your fri­ends in the office will be doing real work. Cre­a­ting pre­sen­tation images is indeed impor­tant and you will still be a valuable mem­ber of the team, but, in the end this won’t amount to anything more than an image that makes your cli­ent “oooh and ahh.”

10. You Will Learn Less

This is simi­lar to the last point. While you are model­ling, you won’t be doing any detai­ling, space planning, or structu­ral coor­di­nation. Really, you are going to be mis­sing out on all of those “impor­tant tasks” that will make you a more complete archi­tect. There is no 3d Model­ling section on the exams.

11. You Will Be Under-appreciated

Because you won’t be involved in those other tasks that really result in a final set of working docu­ments, your con­tri­bu­tion won’t be reco­gnized as much. 3D model­ling is expec­ted to be a simple auto­ma­ted pro­cess and the crazy amount of time you pour into your assign­ments will be dimi­nished by your employers high expectations.

12. Pro­fes­si­o­nals Do It Better

Seri­ously, they do. You could spend a solid month on a model and it won’t look as good as when a pro­fes­si­o­nal ren­de­rer works a day or two on the pro­ject. You don’t have the skill-set or the digi­tal lib­rary to trump the pro­fes­si­o­nals. From per­so­nal expe­ri­ence, I have seen a pro­fes­si­o­nal ren­de­ring firm model the entire Dubai Waterfront Deve­lop­ment overnight…from scratch. These are the images that you have pro­bably seen for a few years now, inclu­ding the early images of the new world’s tallest buil­ding. That’s right, they were done in a span of one night! Could you possi­bly compete with that?

 

If ren­de­ring is some­thing that you enjoy and you WANT to spend your days doing so, then go into ren­de­ring pro­fes­si­o­nally. You will pro­bably get paid more and you will be much more appre­ci­a­ted for your work. The ren­de­rer that my firm uses, who I talk to once or twice a week, was once an archi­tect. He has enough knowledge about archi­tecture that I can use industry ter­mi­no­logy to convey my ideas. He also can work on pro­jects from afar and can con­ti­nually be challenged my diffe­rent pro­jects week after week.

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