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• Tailor-made Presentation
Understanding how the client will process your renderings may be just as important as the rendering itself.
Tom Driscoll, president
Cabana Pools Aquatech Inc.
Houston, Texas
I did hand renderings for years, but decided I needed to do something more efficient. I like to draw, but making the necessary changes during the design process becomes time consuming. I’ve switched to AutoCAD, and I’ve hired a professional with a degree in interior design who’s very proficient at it. I have been taking on a lot more responsibility, so I wanted someone to come in and start doing the drawings. I assist her and review the drawings, but I’m not sitting at my table and hand drawing for hours on end.
We chose AutoCAD because we can make changes very quickly, and it’s very precise. Architects and engineers related to that better, because that’s what they basically all use. We can easily send a PDF file to an engineer if they need it, and we can send it to the client to view from their own computer. But to protect our intellectual property, the drawings are not downloadable and they won’t print to scale. We say on the drawings that they cannot be duplicated in any way without our permission.
We combine that with Pool Studios software. It isn’t to scale, but it helps us determine if the client likes the general concept. We do that before the CAD drawing to show the general flow and how the backyard is going to look on a basic level. This way we can communicate back and forth with the client via computer, using Pool Studio to see what they like and if they want to change this color or that. We send them the files online, and they can view it at their own leisure.
The only time I hand-render drawings is to show in detail how something is supposed to look. I might have to do that for our subcontractors, particularly at the gunite phase of the job. They might ask, ‘How do you want this notched?’ I can just sketch it out really quickly.
