Re: Re: Design Conceptualisation: The Rise of CAD

@3dimageworks wrote:

The only difference being that on is “set in” a actual photo of the development and the other in a virtual environment.

Perhaps it is the only difference, but it’s a crucial difference, particularly when one of the principal purposes of such tools is to facilitate non-professional understanding of, say, the impacts of a development. Ass I said above, such tools can be dangerous in that they can deliberately or accidentally misrepresent the reality of a situation, so I’d question the use of the term ‘photomontages’ to describe some of the thus-titled images that often accompany planning applications.
However, and on a more general point, ‘photomontages’ carries with it the implication of veracity and honesty- “But look! We took the original pictures on site!”, whereas anyone with even a passing familiarity with photography knows that there are too many variables in the process (lens type, exposure, focal length, etc etc)) to permit reliability. In other words, you can pretty much take any picture you require if you have the right equipment, not to mention the manipulability that comes with the digital age. Having said that, there is no single method of illustration/depiction that is fail-safe. And there is no substitute for familiarising oneself with a proposed development site by actually visiting it.

For either photomontages or 3D mock-ups to have any worth in the planning system, they should be carried out by a third party not attached to the developer. I worked in a planning consultancy and I recall one of the senior associates saying ‘We can’t use that one, but this one looks great! Do you think we could get [the company that produced them] to re-do these from a different angle?”