Architectural renderings add dimension to design

Graeme Daley officially launched his business, Daley Renderings, two months ago, but says, with a laugh: “It’s not launched until somebody knows about it.” The Indian Hill native is offering estate, urban and graphic design with a focus on 3-D renderings.

He first got into design and renderings playing a game on his grandfather’s computer.

“At the time (1995) it was intensely crude, really just geometry," he says. "With technology over the past 10 or 15 years, you can now do almost anything you can imagine. The program I use is the same program Pixar uses to make their box office movies and the same program that’s used to make Halo."

Daley focuses on architectural renderings and targets clients, such as architects and real estate agents, whose larger projects won’t find the expense of such a rendering prohibitive. “The ideal person for what I do could either be an architect that’s come up with a showcase design and wants a presentation that conveys that, say, if you’re proposing a new tower or university building and want something to roll out to the public.”

The role of his renderings is to help take 2-D plans and drawings and enliven them. He illustrates with computer-generated videos of his 3-D renderings exactly how a project will look from various angles. Or, as in a recent case, in which Daley was hired by a local real estate firm, he can show different ways a project could appear. In this case, Daley created four potential uses for two adjacent lots, showing how driveways could be curved for privacy and even demonstrating how both houses could be replaced by a single mansion.

Because Daley went through what he calls “the nine-year Bachelor’s plan,” he has some experience in mechanical engineering and industrial design, as well as architecture. (He eventually graduated from the University of Cincinnati's College of DAAP, by the way.) And while he says he might make more money in other states with more new builds, he’s sticking close to home, and enjoys watching Cincinnati grow and improve.

By Robin Donovan