Visualization for Landscape Architects

[archlabs]

I was recently contacted by a landscape architect looking for a few renderings of gardens+landscape they are designing. I have never worked with a landscape architect nor did I think it was a potential industry we could develop ourselves in. I did a few searches to see if anybody has segmented themselves in working in this particular avenue; but no luck so far.

 

So, my questions are:

1) Has anybody worked with landscape architects that are willing to share some advice or tips on working in this particular avenue?

2) Do you think this is a market worth looking into? Or its too small of a niche?

 

Thanks

[john2000]

The experience of working for them could only benefit your Arch Vis. work.

I am a big fan of a vis. artist that has a landscape design background. The garden design experience that he has really shows in his 3d Architectural work. Surrounding gardens of a composition can make or break it - no matter how good the arch model is. Also the technology is good enough so that you can offer realistic and fairly fast renders. Well.. faster than it used to be.

[Brodie Geers]

Could be a great experience. My fear would be that you'll certainly need to find/make exact matches for each type of plant, flower, tree, and grass they're designating. Wouldn't be too difficult in 2d because you can find images for most anything but you won't find 3d models for everything if you go that route so I'd think you'd need to get pretty familiar with Onyx.

 

-Brodie

[Scott Schroeder]

I'll have to agree with what Brodie mentioned in the fact of specific plants and trees. If this is something you want to do, I'd at least make sure you talk with the landscape people and let them know that you can get close matches but cannot be expected to get exact matches. Unless they want to pay for you to model those, buying them can be hit and miss as it depends on if they have that type of plant.

 

I think it's an untapped market for sure. From what I've seen, many landscape architects are still using hand drawn sketches for viz purposes.

[DaveMBarb]

I am myself a Landscape Architect and by far the most difficult thing is in presenting plant material. Because plants look different over time, you need to be sure from your client when in the life cycle of a plant they want to sell. We often produce our drawings/renderings showing plants at 10 years post-installation which means that most plant and shrub beds have merged into solid masses and trees have a mostly mature canopy.

 

For specimen plants that need to be species accurate, I tend to find a 2D image of the plant that I want to use, then model (in Onyx) something similar but only use it to generate shadows. Then I compost the 2D tree in Photoshop and call it a day. For non-specimen plants or things in masses, as long as the general shape and color is correct, you should be fine.

 

I know that it is near impossible to have fully realized 3D plant material that matches what will be installed, especially with there being so many plant cultivars available. I try to get close by matching the tree family if I can't get a specific species. As a designer, I know the difference, but the ultimate client knows (if the designer has done their job correctly) that a rendering is a representation of what a project COULD look like and not a photo from the future.

 

The reason we LA's have been slow to adopt 3D is due to the large cost and time investment (in rendering hours) of vegetation plug-ins, especially since we are usually the first part of the design budget that is cut...

[archlabs]

Thanks for all the reply's.

 

I will be meeting the client again so hopefully I will gain some more insight. I will be proposing a more loose approach to the rendering vs the photorealistic style we usually offer. I'll keep an update on the process.

[MBetke]

I used to work with landscape architects two times and it was difficult to communicate that the plants won't look 100% like in nature. It was a real-time viz so a tree can't be more than 2000tris or so.

The problem was also that landscape architect wanted saturated and green colors but the building architect had another look in mind. To bring those two together and tell that vegetation in 3d can't be matched too the special needs without additional costs needs to be communicated.

At the end we did a good solution and everyone was pleased. but it was a process to understand how 3D works.