DanJansenson

There's another issue, at least for architects, which has been peripherally discussed here before. There is a disconnect between the time needed, up front, to model the project, the way an architect gets paid, and the time when benefits derived from the model make their appearance. Most architects traditionally get paid roughly in line with the phase of the work completed. Schematic design, design development, construction documents, etc. But a process that relies on extensive development of a 3D model does not follow the traditional phases of architectural work. Some of the up-front 3D work is design, certainly. But much of it has a direct impact on the final construction documents, when information gets extracted from the model. One could say that an important piece of the effort invested in creating a quality 3D model only receives its compensation late in the life of a project. In practice this means that an architect who invests considerable resources up front in developing a model is taking a signficant risk. A client could change their minds late in the project, or even cancel the project outright, as has happened to me several times this past year. And then it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to ask for compensation for work done early in the process that doesn't fit neatly into the phase-oriented timelines of normal architectural contracts.

Escalatina.com is a web-based collection of high-res images of people from Latin America, suitable for use in renderings. The ArchDaily description is here. The images are free to use, but cannot be sold. I've prepared image props from most of the images currently on the site right now (the number of images is expanding regularly as new contributions flow in). A VW 2018 file containing 140 image props can be downloaded here. Feel free to download and use. Dan Jansenson

I think that if the 1% level of precision at three feet holds for distances beyond that, it could easily be reasonably suitable for most residential projects. A fifteen-foot room dimension would read +/- 1.8 inches, and that is well within the error margin for most manual measurements with tape. Not ideal, and a laser scan would obviously be far more accurate, but good enough for many jobs, especially if backed up with occasional manual measurements. My issue with this is that it would be hard to transfer the cost of the equipment and the service to clients for payment. At the moment, I can hire someone to do as-builts, and then charge for it as a discrete reimbursable, similar to printing at a bureau. In the past, when I printed using my own plotter, I had difficulty getting reimbursed for that, and now bureau printing is an explicit–and less expensive–reimbursable.

Actually you can have more than one layer in Renderworks, by using the Decal feature. Dan J.