Residential designers are opening doors to the virtual home using ATI’s ATI FireGL™ 3D graphics

Model homes give buyers a chance to step into the real thing before making their purchase decision but developers are now taking the home-shopping scene a step further by using animated 3D computer renderings. What better way to show off homes than in a lifelike setting of moving people and cars, flying birds, swaying trees, and even drifting clouds, according to residential design firm RED+GRAY. UK-based RED+GRAY, specializes in bringing home designs to life with stunning 3D renderings, enabling them to more effectively market and sell houses throughout Europe. And since adding ATI’s FireGL™ graphics accelerators to all of its workstations in 2004, the firm has reached a new level of performance, realism and stability, according to Anthony Young, Red+Gray's IT & software coordinator. “Our success in the market relies on our expertise and on our ability to consistently deliver to clients exceptionally high-quality, photorealistic images of precisely detailed home designs,” Young says from RED+GRAY’s offices in Staffordshire, England. “With ATI’s FireGL cards, we’ve seen a pretty dramatic improvement in areas such as stability, speed and 3D-rendering performance. Overall we are getting the highest quality we’ve ever seen in our still and animated images.” RED+GRAY is an independent firm of 14 designers who use workstations equipped with ATI’s FireGL graphics cards and Autodesk 3ds Max software to create 3D architectural models for residential developers who rely on renderings as a key part of their sales and marketing campaigns. Home buyers can easily enjoy a “walk through” that reveals every detail of the homes on display, in addition to viewing the home in its actual future setting.

RED+GRAY’s 3D models also play an important role for developers who can often become involved in contentious planning situations that require them to clearly illustrate for regulators the precise details of designs, plans and proposed developments before gaining approval to build.

A typical workflow for RED+GRAY designers involves manipulating large AutoCAD files of building sites and surrounding scenery to produce templates that are transformed using Autodesk 3ds Max software tools into precise 3D models.

The increased stability and rendering speed that ATI cards are providing have allowed RED+GRAY to significantly reduce production time for projects this year.

“ATI’s FireGL cards have given us a whole new level of stability,” says Young. “We were using competitor’s cards previously and facing constant crashes. When we switched to ATI we saw an immediate improvement in reliability as well a 25% to 35% increase in performance. So our productivity went way up just by turning to ATI.”

Rendering and manipulating data-heavy files is now much faster and Young attributes that in part to the design of ATI’s ATI FireGL graphics and the improved performance compared to the cards that RED+GRAY was using previously.

“Rendering has been much faster and smoother. Updating speed has been excellent. We are throwing around complex and textured 3D models with relative ease,” he says.

Young notes that maximum stability and uptime is absolutely crucial in meeting tight deadlines, and he cites an animation project that RED+GRAY worked on to depict a large development and park in Birmingham, England, as one example of the role that graphics cards can play today in a firm’s success or failure.

“Our previous graphics cards could not handle the display of vast amounts of information on the screen the application was constantly crashing and progress was very slow on that project,” Young says. “Installing ATI’s FireGL graphics accelerators has since allowed us to display far more complex content and to work more reliably by speeding up the process and eliminating such crashes.”

With the improvements to its imaging processes, RED+GRAY is expanding its visualization process in ways that were impossible before switching to ATI technology, Young says.

“We are now creating larger site scenes with more information and detail. In addition to that, we are easily creating animated elements that add a new dimension or realism, from birds, trees and skies to moving vehicles and people,” says Young. “The improvements we are seeing in stability, memory usage and performance mean that we are even more capable of taking on larger projects and meeting the exceptionally high standards being set both by our designers and our clients. We are actually planning to increase our reliance on ATI - any new workstations we acquire will include ATI’s latest ATI FireGL workstation technology.”

• RED+GRAY Case Study (PDF)