This week, we spoke with Dan Jeacock, a senior CAD Technician at engineering consultancy Cundall, based in Manchester, United Kingdom. Getting his start as a junior CAD technician in a structural team at a large firm, he increasingly gained exposure to the architecture world, using 3D software like Revit and Navisworks. As his career progressed, he became a ‘Revit Technician’, building concept design models for initial design proposals, as well as architectural visualizations and renderings. Now at Cundall, he works predominantly in a structural environment, working solely in Revit and producing design visualizations from time to time.
Jeacock was an early adopter of cloud rendering in Autodesk 360. He first discovered cloud rendering in Revit through Autodesk Labs, as it was being trialed under the name Project Neon. Since then he’s used it regularly and enjoyed seeing the functionality improve drastically over a short period of time.
For this featured “Selby Leisure Centre” rendering, Jeacock used rendering in Autodesk 360 to quickly visualize a Revit design for a client proposal. “My team wanted to be able to illustrate their vision for the project without having to rely solely on words. These renderings created an immediate impact on the client—that became the most important factor in the end,” he says.
For this particular rendering, Jeacock was outsourced to a local architecture firm in Lancashire, UK called Bradshaw, Gass & Hope. The project called for a local leisure facility that included a public pool, fitness suites, and more, as part of a redevelopment of leisure facilities across the Selby, Yorkshire area. The firm wanted him to create the model solely for visualization purposes, producing beautiful renderings that would help them win a spot on the design team.
Jeacock spent a lot of time selecting materials from the rendering library as well as custom making other materials.
“The truth is, without the cloud rendering function we would never have been able to produce any photorealistic images for this project. It basically eliminated any problems we were experiencing with hardware availability, processor power, time constraints, computer crashes….the list goes on,” he says.
The ease at which Jeacock was able to produce this rendering gave him more control to show off some of main architectural features of the building such as the large glazed front elevation, brise soleil grillage, and the acoustic baffles on the ceiling of the swimming area. The image was selected because of it's high quality visualization of these features.
Overall, Jeacock finds much satisfaction in perfecting his renderings. “The section of my portfolio that contains all of my rendering work is the part that I have enjoyed the most." He also says it’s helped him get one or two jobs along the way. Though his time now is not spent creating visualizations as much as he’d like, he makes sure to keep up to speed so that he can get back into rendering on a daily basis in the future.
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