Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Architectural visualizations

[Scott Drennan (scottd]

Hi Fred,

On Wed, Feb 23, 2022 at 8:57 AM Fred H Olson <fholson [at] cohousing.org> wrote:

> ...
> I wonder if any proposed cohousing communities have used such
> services or how much they have created graphics to help potential
> members imagine the proposed community.
> ...


That's a really good question, and something our marketing team spent a lot
of time thinking about. Often visualizations are something your
architecture firm will include in the contract, but ours didn't, and in
some ways I think that's a good thing. It prompted us to develop our own
marketing illustrations for the website early on, and as the design got
more defined we got more elaborate.

We hired a 3D artist to create models ( https://treehousevillage.ca/status/
) and a fly-through ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6V5BxTl0rY ) which
we used on our website, I think to good effect. There are some inaccuracies
(more concrete and less green in a number of places, some architectural
inconsistencies) but this provided a good flavour. Total cost was under
$5,000 CAD ($4000 USD) for someone local to us - we didn't look into
pricing for any of the Internet-only offerings.

If I were to do it again, I'd be tempted to do more modelling earlier, and
be prepared to update it as the design evolves. Tools like
https://www.sketchup.com offer free and low-cost entries to 3D modelling,
and it's possible for amateurs to do some pretty impressive work, then hand
off to professionals for things like a 3D fly-through.

cheers,
Scott
Treehouse Village Ecohousing
Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, Canada
(Under construction)
https://treehousevillage.ca