When Is It Okay to Cheat?

There's a moment on many projects where somebody asks whether the glazing could look a bit more alive.

It's a reasonable request. We've always thought of the windows as the eyes of a building, and glass in a CGI can come out flat and grey, because that's what glass does on an overcast day. Dead eyes. Nobody is commissioning a picture of an overcast day.

So we lift the reflections a little. Put something in the sky worth reflecting. The building starts to look like the building everyone has in their head.

Is that cheating?

What Actually Happens

Quite a lot, if we're honest about it.

Materials get tweaked. Surfaces become slightly more reflective, or slightly less. The sun is chosen for the image rather than inherited from the day the photograph was taken. Bins disappear. The tarmac is cleaner than tarmac ever is (and potholes are obviously removed!). Trees are the size they'll be in fifteen years, not the size they'll be on handover.

None of that is unusual and none of it is secret. It's the ordinary craft of making an image that communicates something, and most of it has a defensible reason behind it.

The industry even has a name for the output, and the clue is sitting in it. Artist's impression. An impression, by an artist.

The trouble is that nobody reads it that way. They read it as a photograph of the future.

Make It Flat

Years ago, on a project I won't identify, we put a slight undulation into the reflections across a glazed elevation. Real glass is never perfectly flat, so the reflections bend and ripple a little, and we had taken the trouble to show it.

The draft went out. The client came back and asked why the glass looked bumpy and distorted.

We explained that this is simply what glass does. The reply was that we were being too clever, and could we make it flat.

So we made it flat.

The same client, on another view of the same scheme, asked us to take out the swans we had put on the river. Too much of a cliché, apparently. So the swans went as well.

I still think about those two notes, because they pull in opposite directions. One image was too accurate. The other was too picturesque. Nobody was trying to mislead anyone in either case.

Taken together, they're a fair description of the job. Not what's true, and not what's pretty. What reads as true.

The Easy Half

For planning work this is largely settled, and I've written about it here before. An AVR is a technical document rather than a creative one. It's produced so that somebody who would quite like to prove you wrong can check the camera position, the lens and the geometry, and if it can't be checked it isn't doing its job. (They've been a core part of what we do for the best part of thirty years, which I mention mostly so you know where I'm standing.)

The awkward half is everything else. The marketing image, the consultation board, the investor deck, the shot that ends up ten feet wide on a hoarding. No survey data, no agreed standard, no definition of too far. Just judgement.

Images move. One made to sell a scheme has a habit of turning up later on a consultation board, because it's the best one anybody has. At that point an illustration of intent is doing the work of evidence, in front of people who will stand on that spot and compare. That's usually how trust goes, and almost never because somebody set out to mislead. The image may have been honest in its original context. The problem starts when it's used in a different one.

Where I Draw It

I should be straight about this, because a list of things we would never do would be a bit precious.

We get asked for plenty. Put a north-facing elevation in full sun. Choose the one viewpoint where the service yard disappears. Ease the neighbouring block back a little so the scheme reads more generously.

We push back on those, and that conversation is a normal part of the week.

But the line isn't composition, because composition is the work. Choosing the hour, the weather, the season, the activity, what sits in the foreground and where the eye goes first: a photographer makes every one of those decisions before the shutter opens, and nobody accuses them of lying for waiting until six in the evening.

The line is a claim. A north-facing elevation in full sun isn't a composition choice, it's a statement about the building that isn't true, and the person standing there in June will work that out. Losing a storey, shrinking a mass, deleting a neighbour's house from a view they live with: same category.

Everything else is interpretation, and interpretation is the job.

The Test

A 3D model doesn't produce an image. It produces geometry. Everything between that and something a person believes is judgement: light, weather, distance, people, attention and restraint.

The question I find useful isn't whether an image flatters. They all flatter. Nobody has ever commissioned an unflattering one.

It's this. When the building is finished, and somebody is standing on the spot the image was taken from, would they feel misled?

If the answer is no, the reflections were probably fine.

Until next week.

Rich

PS: 25 years on, I still can't see a pair (or squadron!) of swans on a river without hearing that note. "You're such a cliché," I tell them. They have never once looked bothered.