Skidmore Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM) is a partnership engaged in architecture, engineering, urban design and planning, interior design, and graphics with offices across the United States and in Europe and the Far East.

With up to 50 architects in each office working with AutoCAD simultaneously on different projects and using 3D Studio VIZ to view the designs, demand for rendering resources led SOM’s London IT Manager Richard Cartwright to search for a solution. After experimenting with rendering on individual workstations and on a dedicated render farm, SOM chose RenderDrive for its robustness, unparalleled image quality, and convenience. Installed as a network resource available to the entire workgroup in each office, RenderDrives give the architects fast turnaround of rendering tasks at any stage of the project.

“For such a powerful device, RenderDrive is very easy to install and work with,” said Cartwright. “You just plug it into the network like a printer — and that’s it.”

RenderDrive is a complete hardware and software solution providing a platform-independent, networked ray-tracing resource. Unlike conventional software ray-tracing renderers, RenderDrive’s custom-designed ray-tracing processors deliver outstanding image quality and very fast turnaround.

With conventional methods it can take an architectural practice up to two weeks to prepare a design presentation for the client. This delay between designing a change and presenting it for the client’s approval can inhibit the development of the project.

Cartwright confirmed that fast delivery of photorealistic imagery with new technology makes a substantial difference to SOM’s working methods: “We’re using VIZ and RenderDrive to provide high-quality images of the project as a front-end tool all through the design process — showing the effects of proposed changes in minutes rather than days.”

Using RenderDrive as a schematic design tool, SOM can deliver to clients the kind of detailed understanding of a proposal that cannot be conveyed by an architect’s sketch. “Making even a small alteration to the curvature of a glass wall, for example, can have a profound effect on the way a building looks,” added Cartwright. “The way it catches the light and reflects the surroundings will change enormously, and with RenderDrive, you can show that in a very accurate and convincing way. With a sketch or a low-quality computer rendering, it could be difficult for an architect to understand the effect of the changes and to put them across to a client.”

As a practice with a global reach, SOM’s projects often involve collaborative work between offices on different continents, and consultations with clients based many thousands of miles away from the architects working on the project. Using ProjectPoint to assist remote collaboration between its architects and with clients, SOM is able to deliver secure Internet access to images created with RenderDrive, as well other project assets including drawings, memos, and specifications.

“Standards of visual sophistication have risen so much that we are all used to photorealistic imagery in movies and on the television,” Cartwright concluded. “Our architects and our clients expect it too, and that’s exactly what we provide — but it would be impossible without RenderDrive.”