By taking a digital model and manipulating it in a program such as Adobe Photoshop, Burden can add a more hand-drawn look and feel, as shown in Figures 6 and 7. He also frequently employs color printers to output to watercolor paper and then finishes a presentation using colored pens. The end product is frequently of frameable artistic quality, as shown in Figure 8. His clients often find him by discovering his work in architectural offices and through word of mouth, says Burden. The Society also publishes a catalog of sample renderings that is available to the architectural community.
Naming conventions are perhaps a subtle thing, but they make a difference in how a product feels.
It's interesting that Burden's hybrid approach to rendering and modeling is mirrored in the DataCAD product itself. Perhaps it's a cup that can be seen through, but other objects are not transparent. Through a hybrid method of rendering, which represents a smaller subset of algorithms, you save rendering time. Rendering time is one of the key roadblocks that has discouraged more architects from moving more resolutely to visualization tools, say both Burden and Gempeler. Architects track their project costs by billable hours.