How to Approach the Best Surrounding Context for Your Project?
How to make your design impressive and eye-catching? This is a long-lasting issue that many architects are striking to find an answer. Photorealistic 3D rendering helps the architect to communicate their design in a visible way and present the future property in already existing surroundings. This is a long list. But how to choose the right backdrop, especially in the aerial view, is the topic we will talk about today. Now, let me ask you a question, have you ever struggled in handling the surrounding context when you’re making an aerial view? If this problem crossed your mind, this article will have the answer to your question.
In many years of making 3D architectural visualization, AIMIR has collected many commonly asked questions in the rendering process, and write this article based on our expertise and experience. Here is the previous article that introduces the 4 ways of handling the surrounding context, 4 Methods of Dealing With Context Buildings In Architectural Visualization. It will give you a basic idea of how we often dealing with the surrounding. But in order to make things more understandable, we add more details and make some improvements. Read up to find out!
How to choose?
I am sure after reading the article above, you already have a rough idea of what’s the difference of the surrounding context. Next, we’re prepared a chart with details and recommend level for each solution, which may be helpful for you to decide what’s best for your project.
| Photo composition | Using existing Building from the library | Rough model | Modeling based on google Map | |
| Recommend level | ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ | ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ | ♦ ♦ ♦ | not recommended |
| Description | It’s a highly recommended method for its amazing effect and easy-to-operate. It will require you to provide the drone high-resolution images that match the same camera angle and mood as the renderings. | Refer to the street layout and density of the surrounding in the Google map, but use the existing models from our library. We will put the similar buildings in the backdrop according to the google map. | To model the surrounding based on the google map by using the rough model, which will show the building’s rough structure like general structure, windows, doors etc…but without specific detail. | To model the surroundings exactly based on the google map, which requires your side to provide the high-resolution images of each building. It’s a complicated and time-consuming method that will lead to additional fees. Normally, we don’t suggest using this method especially in high density city center. |
| Workload | ♦ ♦ | ♦ ♦ | ♦ ♦ ♦ | ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ |
| Working duration | ♦ ♦ | ♦ ♦ | ♦ ♦ ♦ | ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ |
| Additional Fees | no additional fees | no additional fees | ♦ ♦ ♦ | ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ |
| Similarity | 100% | 20%-30%（just the location and height as same as the google map) | 60%-80%（just the location, height, and exterior shape as same as the google map） | 100% |
| Effect |  |  |  |  |
As you can see that the effective and efficient way is photo composition and using the existing model from the library. But if you’re looking for 100% similar to the reality surrounding, the best choice is photo composition. Not only because it reduces the workload but also presents the best visual effect among the other three options. Frankly speaking, the last one is the modeling based on the google map. It will take a long period to complete the surrounding, if you’re working on the masterplan, it might take a month to finish only the surrounding.
Case sharing
Recently, we are working on a complex project. Everything goes well except for the surrounding context of the aerial view. As usual, AIMIR has offered the best option to save our client time and energy. But our client can’t provide the surrounding composition for us due to the expensive drone service and he wants to use the exact same buildings as the reality for the marketing presentation. Finally, we came up with a makeshift to solve this problem.
For the aerial view, we are offering the conjoint ways of rough model + the existing model from our library to handle the surrounding. See the screenshot below: The distant view is using similar buildings from our library, which are placed in the right direction as same as google map yet the building’s shapes are not exactly the same as the real. The close shot is the rough model made based on the Google map. We will model the shape and layout as same as the reality. Our client is very happy about this solution and the final 3D renderings. (Because of the confidentiality of this project, we are not allowed to release the full image.)
The way of handling the surrounding texture caused by many elements that need to be considered and well-executed while complementing it in a perfect way. If you’re interested in our 3D rendering service, warmly welcome you to contact us. We are always flexible to deal with the problem whenever it occurred in the rendering and meet the different demands of our clients.