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FOR AS LONG as people have been designing kitchens and trying to explain them to their clients, there has usually been some sort of rendering involved. A rendering means diferent things to many diferent people. For some it's a beer-stained cocktail napkin drawn at a dimly lit bar (followed, of course, by a huge check). For other designers, it's a full-on photo- realistic rendering with intricate detailing. For the rest of us, there's the in between, which can range from hand drawings to whatever we can get out of the CAD program we're using. Let's talk about the diferent kinds of ren- derings and how you, as the designer, can use digital and analog tools to make better ones. HAND RENDERINGS I remember doing these in high school drafting – 2D technical drawings and 3D perspectives with the vanishing points oh-so-carefully plotted out. When I learned that, we were just getting to the end of the hand drafting age. Or were we? With the advent of powerful computers, hand drafting seems to have gone away. However, many things that were old are becom- ing new again. Vinyl records are selling like crazy again. Flannel is a thing again. So how – in this cutting edge, get-it-all- done-right-away world – can a designer do a hand drawing in a reasonable amount of time? You can by using computer generated 3D line drawings as the basis of your hand drawings. My friend, Jim Leggit, over at www. drawingshortcuts.com, is a master at this. He uses SketchUp and other 3D programs to print out basic black-and-white perspectives. From there, he has a wonderful system of layering vellum and coloring in the details. I've watched him and the students he teaches turn out mas- terpieces in a fraction of the time I ever thought possible. Jim teaches classes and has some won- derful video and written tutorials that are worth checking out if you still love hand drafting. Just about any CAD program you use these days has some sort of basic rendering available in it. SketchUp can output drawings like the examples above (see images, top left and right). What's nice about this kind of rendering is that you don't have to wait for it. This is actually how you draw in SketchUp. This is a compel- ling way to share a design and explore color and fnish combinations easily with your client. You can even add a little hand-drawn efect easily (see image, top right). I've always thought this method of rendering is a good compromise between hand drafting and pho- torealistic rendering. For me, hand drawings outside of spaceships that I drew as a kid looked pretty terrible. For years I've been saying that photoreal- istic renderings are awesome, but dangerous for designers. The SketchUp style renderings are efective and easy to pull of. No client could ever reasonably say their countertops or other fnishes didn't exactly match a ren- dering like that. Times are changing, though. In 2012, IKEA had about 12 percent of its catalog as a 3D render- ing. That's right, 12 percent of what you saw in an IKEA catalog in 2012 was all computer generat- ed. Fast forward to 2014 and the company was at over 75 percent rendered. At the rate IKEA is going, it will hit 100 percent very soon. Even aside from IKEA, consumers are see- ing renderings everywhere. As a result, they're Tips to Improve Your Renderings ERIC SCHIMELPFENIG, AKBD Jim Leggit at www.drawingshortcuts.com uses Sketchup and other 3D programs to print out black and white perspectives, and then uses a system of layering vellum and coloring in the details. Sketchup allows users to quickly output basic draw- ings like the one above. Users can also add a little hand drawn efect to Sketchup drawings to further personalize them. Today's profession- ally done renderings can be so sophisticated, they can easily be mistaken for actual photographs. Renderings courtesy of Nick Miller Design. www.nickmillerdesign.com 20 Kitchen & Bath Design News • March 2016 DESIGN TECHNOLOGY