How was ArchViz ten years ago

In today's digital landscape, where the majority of CG artists primarily showcase their work on social media platforms, it has become challenging to highlight specific works or individual creators. Initially, new 3D visualizations are shared by the creators themselves, often across multiple accounts, before being picked up and reposted by various aggregators. Consequently, new content becomes quickly entangled with older posts in an endless cycle of re-sharing. With such a vast volume of publications, any new creation is often forgotten the very next day. However, this wasn't always the case.

Before the advent of social media, the Archviz community shared their 3D visualizations on specialized thematic websites. The most exceptional works were curated by site administrators and received recognition through awards. These outstanding pieces were prominently featured in dedicated sections on the websites, serving as benchmarks for quality and trend indicators within the Archvis industry. Top works could spark attention and discussion for weeks on end. The works showcased below exemplify this era. Some may even be deemed epic, representing a bygone era of legendary CG artists.

These works were crafted in a time when:

• Corona Renderer did not exist; V-Ray was the most renowned rendering engine.
• YouTube tutorials were unavailable.
• Texture or object scans were not commonplace; the primary source of textures was search engines or resources like textures.com.
• A plethora of ready-made 3D models were not available; platforms like 3sky did not sell models.
• Popular plugins such as Forest Pack, Floor Generator, and Scatter were not yet developed.
• Online courses were nonexistent; acquiring information required extensive experimentation.
• GPU rendering was not utilized.

Considering these limitations, it often took months of dedicated work to complete a single project.

Furthermore, the resolution of these renderings is relatively low, reflecting the smaller sizes of monitors during that era.

3Dmitri. 2009.

Tianyi Zhu. 2011.

Marek Denko. 2010.

Olivier Defaye. 2009.

Author unknown. 2009.

Pure render (Bertrand Benoit). 2008.

Derek Jackson. 2007.

Denis Hotin. 2008.

Zuliban. 2005.

Lichtecht. 2011.

Author unknown. 2008.

Juan Altieri. 2008.

Alessandro Prodan. 2009.

And this project of Alessandro requires special attention. Work on the project has been going on for about 3 years, from the moment of the first tests. The entire scene was completely modeled by the author. The vegetation in the scene had 900,000,000 polygons. The project was rendered on a 4-core Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 with 4GB of RAM.

Viktor Fretyan. 2008.

Project "The third and the seventh" by CG artist under the pseudonym Alex Roman (real name Jorge Seva). 2009.

Greatest architectural visualizer of all time. He worked on the project "The third and the seventh" for 3 years, composing short stories from popular architectural structures of the world, and not only. Alex was obsessed with his work like no other. He rendered frames for animation around the clock, with little or no breaks. One day he went on vacation for 2 weeks, leaving his PC to render the sequence. Since he did not have a render farm, he could not lose time on rendering. 10 years later, his work still inspires young CG artists around the world. And his film will forever go down in the history of architectural visualization as an example of quality and an example of the enormous capabilities of one person who has talent and is in love with his work.