Such a list is like any other list; no matter how many things you list, others will clamor to lengthen the list.
I’m not interested in list exhaustion though, so I limit this to two types of visualization in AEC, both workhorses, the latter a war horse.
- Rendering, i.e., illustration.
- Technical drawing, i.e., construction drawing.
Rendering is about showing what it’s like to be in, or around, a place.
Renderings are evocative.
Technical drawing is about showing what a thing is.
Here are some architectural renderings I did between 2004 and 2008:
Technical drawing, “showing what a thing is,” more specifically includes 5 things:
I did construction drawing for 12 years at architecture firms, incidentally, largely via automation starting in 1996, automating drawing graphics from models.
Then I went to work in software development.
I brought the work I’d done in two kinds of visualization, to software. This led to contributions:
- V2.0 (see below), automated drawing-model fusion, now in 9 software products.
- V3.0, what happens to drawing and modeling media (as media) after their fusion (proposed):
V1.0 Drawings in Mental Models
Drawings belong in models. It’s where they’ve always been. For good reason. From the first time anyone scratched out a drawing in sand, on a cave wall, on papyrus, they instantiated that graphic in-situ where it really is, in the mental model in formation in their minds. An interplay was underway.
V2.0 Drawing-Model Fusion (2012)
With the popularization of digital modeling by the 1990s, technical drawing continued as before in its usual role, while instantiation into the model continued as it always had as mental exercise only, unaltered from V1.0 until I invented the automated fusion of drawings in digital models in 2012.
Fusion, …like recorded sound in (formerly) silent film.
(OPEN VCS) V3.0
Using digital models to evolve the form
of expression, of the vehicle for looking with intent — at models mental, physical, and digital — and showing that you did.
Not only a fusion, but an evolution in form that surfaces the best of both media, model and drawing, in a new form of expression greater than the sum of its parts.
OPEN VCS, a lens for looking at models 