171: Real-Time Rendering & Virtual Reality Series: The Evolution of Design

Matt McMullen, Justin Gross and Mallory Gaylor, former Associate Principal and Associates at Abel Design Group, join us on this episode 171 of Art of Construction. Several months ago we featured the founder and managing director of Enscape, Moritz Luck on AOC episode 157 entitled How a Video Game Became Architecture’s Most Powerful New Tool. Now, after hearing the story of how this amazing new company and tool came to be, we wanted to take a deeper dive into Enscape and what it has to offer the AEC community. We’ll be doing this by interviewing three power users who utilize Enscape in their architecture firms. In this second episode we spoke with three members of Abel Design Group, a firm that has recently adopted Enscape into their workflow within the past year. Building off of our first episode in this series, Justin and Mallory reflected on how using Enscape has improved their pitches and overall design process. So far in this series we’ve been focusing on the power of Enscape to let designers create stunning presentations of their projects to stakeholders. But the ability to visualize as you design, instantly rendering BIM-designed buildings with beautiful graphics that give the utmost attention to detail, undoubtedly has effects on the entire design process as well.  In the old days, the architect’s design was mostly in their heads, and they did the best they could to translate that onto 2D drawings or long, drawn-out rendering processes. But now, Enscape lets architects and designers  instantly see and experience their design decisions in real-time. This means that architects can make a design, virtually walk through it, and then decide whether or not they succeeded in what they were aiming for. If not, they get back to work. And if they are in the project stage where they've already sold their design, they can do the same with their client to gather feedback. This sort of virtual, real-time design feedback certainly has huge implications for the Art of Architecture as a whole. In the end, all of these improvements mean more design freedom for architects, and increased visual communication between those who designed the building, the contractors and affiliates that end up building the building, and the ultimate owners and users of the building. This means we are all on the same page. And as we all know, when every party in a construction project is on the same page, everything turns out better.  Enscape is certainly an amazing new company that’s making waves in the industry, and we are honored to help tell their story in this Deep Dive Series. Stay tuned for our final episode with Turner Fleischer!