What Is a Landscape Render?
Landscape architecture rendering creates digital 3D landscapes to help you translate your plans into practical pictures. This is used to make the final design simple to comprehend by your audience, laymen, final users, or competitions jury.
3D landscape visualizations visually interpret your design jargon, landscape architecture design, or even more complex environmental design and planning ability in one frame and quickly conceptualize key experiences of your final project. They are an important part of the iterative process of the collaborative effort for landscape design planning.
All of this happens under one condition: if a 3D rendering studio has experience in creation of storytelling landscape renderings. Let’s take a deeper look for better understanding—why is storytelling, especially when producing 3D landscape visuals, so meaningful?
Bird Paradise in Netherlands / Architects: lab03 x Joustra Reid architecten / 3D portraits: RNDR
Is 3D Storytelling Important While Showing Landscape Architectural Design?
At the core of each image is a visual communication and a visual story. It is analogical to written narrative in texts. Not without a reason do they say that one picture is worth a thousand words – it advocates narrative tools. However, under one condition: only when you know how to embody the storytelling in it.
Creating a narrative on landscape visualizations evokes interplay of the visual elements of your design on images. Using storytelling deftly delves into the iterative process early and helps to grasp your final concept.
It is a helpful tool to use your landscape as text, user as reader and designer as author. What is more, this drags users into becoming creators of design – mostly during the participation design process and then the future user becomes a reader.
This gives the project understanding and this knowledge leads your audience to be as equally critical as you as a designer toward the planning proposition. That is why landscape architecture renderings are efficient narrative opportunities to present your landscape architectural design and invite non-professionals to the landscape architectural design game.
Recognition / Zlota Competition in Warsaw, Poland / Design: S&P Architektura Krajobrazu / 3D portraits: RNDR
Storytelling on Landscape Architecture Visualizations
By underlining intriguing design characteristics on 3D landscape visuals, you can further enhance the immersive experience for your viewers. That is why you should use storytelling to elevate your landscape design presentations while designing 3D images with a professional rendering studio. Thanks to this method, you can easily present such project features as composition, colors, light, sequential volumetric spaces, and more.
When visual storytelling is used consciously, it is easier for you to intrigue your audience through 3D landscape images. There are a few ways of using this method while designing your visual communication on 3D illustrations.
#1 Find a Story When Designing Landscape Architecture
No matter whether your design is historical or modern, both can incorporate elements of local identity or its surroundings. It is nice to dig into that and think about how your project refers to the local identity or create your own. As designers, you have a lot of room for such creativity.
When working with a 3D studio, they should ask about such elements. We normally discuss it with our clients, and if not, we try to create this story together. There are many ways to do so to extract your design and to use unique features of basic design in visual communication.
1st Prize Competition / Project: Langeweg Hoek, Residential Complex, Netherlands / Design: Groosman Architecten x LAP Landscape & Urban Design / Architectural render: RNDR
#2 Tell About the Future
Visualizations are mostly about showing the unbuilt. They help you to expose your ideas and vision. They are a part of your visual communication which helps you to convince your audience about your final design.
Storytelling 3D illustrations are an important tool in the design process. You can use them on the front cover layout, to show how nature preserves design qualities, or simply to convey your project vision.
#3 Show the Lifestyle Rather Than List the Features
Showing what your design proposes is important, of course. The same wise strategy allows showing the ways that people can use the space. Will they identify with it and how can you encourage them to do so? At the end of the day, you are planning the space for people, so thinking about the final users and conveying to them your message is the aim.
#4 Choosing Meaningful Scenes
Portraying a narrative in 3D about your project depends much on the chosen scenes. They are portals to your landscape design. They tell about your vision.
You can start from the details and zoom out to larger scenes, or you can do the opposite – start from scenes showing the context and then zooming in.
The design concept, function, and purpose of your 3D renderings are key factors in determining whether they are fit for competition, pitch, or marketing visuals. Contrasting scenes and diversity can be beneficial in certain projects while being conservative may prove more efficient in others. Sometimes it is better to show fancy and alternative angles while in other projects it is better to stay more conventional. Each design should be evaluated individually to identify the right course of action. Different approaches can often bring out meaningful aspects of the project.
University Campus in Yekaterinburg / Landscape architecture design: S&P Architektura Krajobrazu / Landscape rendering: RNDR
#5 Show the Neighbourhood and Surroundings
Exposing the context is an interesting way to tell how the space connects with the existing environment. It is nice to use it as a narrative element, showing first the design from above in a wider context and after that coming in closer through 3D street view visualizations. Thanks to this, experts and final users will know how your area is connected with the surroundings and how they can experience your design.
Aerial and bird-eye views are very handy here. Using exterior street views can help also, by zooming out from your designed space and showing the entrance.
Pending competition / Transpole Competition, 908 avenue de la République, Marcq-en-Baroeul, France / Design: O-III Architecten x Inside Outside B.V. / Architectural 3D portrait: RNDR
#6. Using Different Seasons While Showing Your Landscape Design
No matter whether you are registered landscape architect or not, you have existing knowledge and know how many opportunities there are to show how plants change along with the seasons. In 3D, there is nothing like authored landscape narratives, but we know how to build the scenes and shots to extract these elements visually.
What Does Each Season Give You When Building Your Project Story?
- Spring 3D Scenes: During this season, take advantage of plants that are just beginning to bloom, using the green colors and giving the viewers the feeling of waking up after winter. They serve you well to show vividness and freshness. They allow your viewers to explore the color palette used for early blooms and how they play with all the hardscape and architecture around the landscape design.
- Summer 3D Scenes: Vibrant colors with a mix of coniferous and deciduous trees, flowering shrubs, and colorful perennials help create vivid scenes with proposals of spaces created for people, showing the inclusivity of your landscape designs’ proposals. These are the most often chosen scenes and they always turn out to look very good, especially when the light setting is during the morning or the afternoon golden hour.
- Autumn 3D Scenes: This season gives an interesting opportunity of using such design features as colors like yellows, oranges, and a lot of reds. But also, nice purple and pink tones come into play when it comes to perennials and some shrubs. These are strong colors, which give a statement to the design. Also, they explore how the plants are changing after summer comes to an end. You can determine if your design leans towards a yellow or red color palette and illustrate how organic plants are paired with hardscapes through design features for surfaces, urban furniture, and lamps. You can either use them to contrast or to align with all the hardscape and architectural elements around.
- Winter 3D Scenes: These are calmer and more focused in their look, exposing the hardscape design characteristics and plants’ trunk colors. They explore contrasting elements and details, for example, cold outdoors and warm inside. In terms of plants, the colors of tree trunks and shrubs become the main actor in the scenography, thus showing how plants look during winter with dry flowers or grasses. These pictures provide a great contrast between the objects of color, such as pavements and furniture, against the backdrop of white snow and a toned-out sky.
Inner landscape of Kloos Alblasserdam / Design and architecture: FSD x Bosch und Slabbers x Van Aken / Architectural exterior visualization: RNDR
#7 Different Weather Day Scenes and Light
Visualizations allow you to show an exterior in every season, at any time of day, under all weather conditions. This kind of context looks organic in high-quality architectural visualizations, especially in terms of outdoor spaces.
Setting a mood depends on the color and light settings. This is why evoking a mood depends a lot on the weather conditions and the time of day shown in the visualization. A foggy scene creates a mysterious mood, a dynamic scene comes from a stormy sky, or a summery image evokes happiness. Furthermore, it is possible to add special effects such as “glare” or “light rays.” Postproduction has many possibilities for magical narration elements, trust us.
Also, depending on your location and geographical settings, you can show where your landscape design is located. For example, it will be different in Spain than it is in Norway. When weather and light settings are used wisely, they can set up a very unique charm and atmosphere in your visuals.
#8 Using Dress Codes of Your Target Groups
When you are creating a landscape design, they always serve some function and they always have a target group. Your design is much more conveying when the type of people, their age, ethnic group identity, gender, or style of clothes are expressed visually. It is easier to determine the landscape design function, for example, if you target seniors or families with children and address your future users.
#9 Contextual Elements & Customizable Context
Each design is unique, and 3D landscape renders should extract this. Using contextual elements such as cars, people, animals, and other details gives the project a link to the existing environment and shows the true potential of the design. Contextual elements can be customized to fit the environment, such as adding surrounding structures or even local cultural spots around the designed space.
#10 Evoking Your Audience’s Emotions
The 3D rendering should be more than just plastic renderings from a machine. They need to have an artistic touch, a message, and an appeal to the audience’s emotions. You can achieve this by using a particular camera angle, giving a dynamic or reflective tone to the render, or by utilizing special effects like blurs or light settings, which add a pinch of magic. It is good to be able to master all the possible techniques in order to bring the designer’s vision to life.
Landscape Storytelling as an Impactful Experience
Storytelling 3D images, thanks to visually written narrative features, can create intimate and impactful experiences, show the project’s desired outcomes, and address diverse clients and audiences. They support the step-by-step process of final planning creation from basic design to more complex narrative visual aspects. But this is only if the 3D rendering studio has the knowledge about how to extract such narrative elements during visual communication and incorporate them in your design process.
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