The Power of Iterations

The Harm and Wonders of the Creative Workflow

The Future Frameworks Beta Program only has 6 spots left, make sure to take your spot now before it is lost forever!

The Importance of Iterations

Iterations are a crucial part of the creative process, especially when generating Architectural Visualisations it is important to generate multiple different versions of compositions, materials, design, and furniture. Not only does this make the client feel as if they are getting their money’s worth but they also feel as if this is a luxury experience.

Iterations can bring many benefits to your service and may even allow you to increase your prices, as I mentioned in one of the previous articles there are multiple things that help increase the value of your services and one of the things you can do is provide multiple compositions to your clients.

Unlocking Success in Arch Viz

The Danger of Iterations

Yes, having multiple iterations of the same project can allow you to generate a better idea of what you want for the scene, it can also help the client feel happier about your services but it can also be a problematic business decision. If you are simply iterating the composition of the scene it may seem like something easy to do but if you are doing it at the end of the process then you will have to spend a lot of time making sure that the sections that have just been revealed are as good of quality as the rest.

That’s why I suggest experimenting with compositions at the beginning, but that is an easy fix although not all iterations are the same. Maybe they ask you to iterate with different furniture and textures in which case unless you are careful you may need to charge them for extra renders which might bring trouble towards the end of the process when it is time to get your other half of the payment.

What I suggest is to iterate with care, and make sure you can generate multiple versions of the same scene in a fast but high-quality way. If you make 3-4 iterations in an hour then that is a pretty good use of your time, if it starts entering the 2-3 hour range I’d suggest not doing as many iterations or trying to make them less detailed. If you are making the iterations for yourself then I’d recommend to only spend 20 minutes on them.

The Magic of Blocking-Outs

Blocking Out a scene is like making a sketch, simply use blocks or assets you have in an asset library and move the furniture around in various ways to experiment and see if there are any ideas that may be better than the original. If you use models instead of cubes I would suggest rendering a clay render rather than a normal one, you don’t want the possibly random textures to work against each other and against the composition

Our general goal with the projects we work with is to generate between 2-3 block-outs before we do anything else. In this image you can see a small bathroom, all textures are somewhat white and they don't distract from each other and the assets were taken from asset libraries. We saw that there is no way a bathtub would fit with this small room so we can decide to change that to a normal shower, we can move around the toilet and sink in different ways to find the best way to position them. In this case, the room was so small we didn’t have many options.

Overall the main benefit of this workflow is that you are able to generate multiple ideas and make sure that you have made the best choice, using AI software is a good way to generate fast iterations but you may not have as much control as you like although this is slowly changing as it gets better and better. I still suggest that the best option is to use a specific asset library or simply blocks to have an idea of how the space in the scene is going to be used.

Content Recommendation:

This video shows a workflow for using Midjourney to inspire your architectural renders, this could be used in a similar way to creating iterations if you first feed Midjourney a render of the walls and the room and then ask it to decorate it. Either way, midjourney isn’t the only AI that can do this and there are multiple others that are specifically trained for architectural renders and interior design.