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Shortest Route to a 3D Throw Pillow
2 Sep, 2010 By: Michele BousquetAs use of Autodesk Revit increases, so does the demand for stock imagery, called entourage, to add detail to architectural presentations.
When Autodesk released Revit Architecture as a BIM solution for the masses, no one would have guessed that its throw pillows would get so much attention. Thanks to the inclusion of the mental ray renderer in Autodesk Revit 2010, what's rocking the worlds of architects and designers these days is the ability to add items such as chairs, lamps, pillows, and vases to their presentations.
Called "entourage," these elements, which include everything from people and cars to flowers and furniture, can be used to "place a building in the context of its environment and relate it to human scale." So says author and digital visualization expert Scott Onstott, who reports that the term originally was used in relation to traditional architectural illustration.
"Entourage adds realism and scale to a scene," says Strachan Forgan, an award-winning San Francisco architect and director of digital design at Sasaki Associates. "Entourage can transform a space into a place, and a house into a home."
Although such visual enhancements have been long been used in architectural renderings, the ease of adding entourage content to Revit designs is taking the process to a new level.
Flex Time
What's changed to make it easier to include entourage in renderings? First, think flexibility. Although Revit Architecture was intended as a tool for designing and documenting buildings — not for showcasing appliances and throw rugs — the extraordinary flexibility of Revit families can easily multiply one parametric window into many, so why not furniture and decorative items too? Build or download a parameterized sofa for your Revit model, and you get a matching loveseat and chair in the bargain. A vase can do double-duty as a planter, a fruit bowl, or even a fountain. 
There's also the time element. Parameterization brings its own time savings, but with the addition of mental ray rendering to Revit, the most time-consuming and costly steps of the visualization pipeline — exporting the design, buying a separate application, and figuring out how to use it — have been eliminated. Gone are the days when an architect or designer had to buy and learn 3ds Max or Maya just to do a single full-color rendering.
Being able to render right in Revit has resulted in an explosion of Revit entourage for more sophisticated architectural presentations, even for architects and designers who skip the fancy renderings and present with hidden line drawings. Designers find that these props add not only dimension, but a sense of dynamic reality. They also generate results.
"We use entourage to give a sense of scale to a space," says Kathleen Scanlon at A4 Architecture & Planning in Rhode Island. "It also helps to enliven the design and get clients excited about being in it themselves." It's simple math: excited clients equal more sales.
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