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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