The Sad Little Details That Make CGIs Work

Not every image needs the full kerb-and-mulch treatment.

Sometimes a quick render is exactly the right thing. For a feasibility study, an early-stage design review, or an internal presentation, something fast and functional can do the job perfectly well.

Not everything needs to be polished to within an inch of its life. Spending as though it does is a waste of everyone’s money.

But when the image actually matters — when it needs to persuade a planning committee, launch a pre-let campaign, or represent a scheme to investors — the difference between “fine” and genuinely convincing is often found in details nobody consciously notices.

Until they’re wrong.

Here are a few of the sad little things that tend to separate visualisation that works from visualisation that nearly works.

Kerbs

It sounds absurd, but kerbs are one of those details that quietly reveals whether someone is really looking.

A kerb that is too perfect draws attention to itself. A kerb that is too worn draws attention to itself. The target is somewhere in the middle: a surface that reads as real without becoming the thing the viewer focuses on.

Enough imperfection to suggest it has been there for a while. Not so much that it looks like the council gave up in 1987.

Getting that right across different scales, materials and lighting conditions is more involved than it probably should be.

When it works, nobody notices.

When it doesn’t, something in the image feels slightly off and nobody can quite say why.

Road Markings

Next time you pull into a supermarket car park, actually look at the white lines.

Not a quick glance. Properly look.

They won’t be solid or uniform. There will be worn patches, blurred edges, gaps where the paint skipped, corners that are not quite square.

That is what a real painted line looks like.

Apply a clean, solid white line to a CGI and it can read as false immediately, even to someone who has never consciously thought about road markings in their life.

Which, let’s be honest, is most normal people.

The care applied to something as dull as a white line tells you a lot about the care applied everywhere else.

Mulch (IKR!)

Landscape drawings might show a lawn with a hedge alongside it.

The quick approach is to create a grass surface and a hedge, join them at a neat edge, and move on.

The problem is that hedges do not grow directly from turf. There is usually a zone of soil, mulch or planting bed at the base. A good lawn rarely meets a hedge with a perfect, computer-generated edge.

In high-quality visualisation, this is modelled rather than implied — sometimes with actual 3D geometry for the mulch itself.

This sounds excessive until you see two images side by side.

In one, the landscaping feels real.

In the other, it looks like a material applied to a shape.

The difference is often at the edges.

Cars

Cars are useful in CGIs. They give scale, activity and context. They help a service yard feel operational, a car park feel occupied, and a building feel like it belongs to the real world.

They are also very good at ruining the illusion.

A left-hand drive car in a British scheme is a small error with an outsized effect on credibility. Once you have seen it, you can’t unsee it.

The same goes for number plates, vehicle specification, road position and traffic direction.

This is becoming especially relevant with AI-generated or AI-enhanced imagery. A lot of AI tools seem very happy to put vehicles on the right-hand side of the road, even when the image is supposed to be in the UK.

At first glance, everything can look impressive.

Then you notice the traffic.

And suddenly you are no longer looking at the building. You are wondering whether the scheme is in Birmingham or Belgium.

That is the problem with tiny errors. They do not stay tiny once the viewer spots them.

Why Materials Sometimes Look Like Plastic

The technical term is specular highlights: the way light catches a surface and bounces back.

When this is calibrated properly, materials read as real. Glass looks like glass. Metal looks like metal. Concrete has the right quality of absorption and reflection.

When it is wrong, the same materials can start to look plasticky, flat or oddly synthetic — like something from a video game rather than a proposed development.

This is one of the more technical distinctions between studios, and one of the harder ones to assess from a portfolio.

But if the materials in an image look slightly fake, overly shiny, or strangely lifeless, this is often part of the reason.

Making Your Building the Subject

A CGI that blends seamlessly into its surroundings is not always a success.

Sometimes, of course, restraint is exactly the point. A planning view or a landscape-led consultation image may need to show that a building sits quietly in its context.

But for many marketing images, the development needs to be clearly understood as the subject.

Good visualisation uses compositional techniques to guide the eye: differential brightness, selective focus, atmospheric depth, foreground framing, contrast, movement.

None of this needs to shout.

But it does need to direct attention.

If your scheme is hard to distinguish from the context around it, the image may be accurate, but it may not be doing the job you need it to do.

None of these things usually appear on a standard shot list.

And most of them should never announce themselves in the final image.

Nobody should look at a CGI and say, “excellent mulch”.

But these details are often the difference between an image that looks broadly fine and one that quietly convinces.

When a project matters enough for the image to do real work, those details are worth caring about.

That’s my thoughts for this week.
Rich.

If you want to know more, give Ed a call:
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07777 146 495