Collaging - a low tech, sketched based approach, providing powerful and playful imagery when done correctly.

This style is a combination of images, renderings and sketches, making the visualisations more memorable. Enabling the visualisations to provide animation and texture using layers.

This style is more about creating the impression of an idea or an emotion, rather than giving an accurate rendering of the space. Its extreme style is achieved through aesthetic colour combinations, textures and use of space; works by the artist layering differing styles and techniques to create an overall narrative. This style captures more of a potential feeling of a place, rather than its architectural properties, and may lend itself more to conceptual buildings.

Photo-real Computer Generated Imagery - Provides the ability to excite people with the placement of proposals within context.

Using natural lighting cues, shadowing and colouring, this style gives viewers the crux of what the design would be like within the context, to be lived in, or around.

However, as you cannot hide behind aesthetics, this is one of the most difficult styles to execute. If you go too far, you may end up with an almost sci-fi looking scene. 3D artists who can create this kind of image must have a mastery of materiality and human perception. Above all, mimicking how light moves in real life is key – and the ability to manipulate and render light takes years of experience.

However, when executed properly, the result is an architectural visualisation that shows a building as though it is already constructed.

Sketches - A Low-tech or combined approach between digital and analogue can provide an emotive and detailed approach to creating exciting visuals.

Using the layering of lines provides the visual with texture, shadows and movement. This allows the style to be more abstract and highlight key areas of a scheme through a narrative.

With the more artistic approach, sketches provide a different visual excitement to normal visualisations, with the look of complexity, and often recognised as time consuming pieces. They allow the creator to express a more individual or narrative side to a project, from the artistic style of the creator, highlighted elements, use of colour or textured shading and the medium they are created in, wherever it be pencil, fine liner or another medium.

The semi-realistic style – like that of watercolours, scaled back to an extent, but it is not a photorealistic form of art. Both virtual and real elements are combined in this style to enhance the looks of real-life 3D renderings.

These visualizations are used in creating an idealistic vision, suitable for an atmosphere. While creating contextual compositions and panoramic views, you can use this style.

Using the right mix of colour and contrast, you can alter the overall mood of the image. For example, certain designers desaturate certain iterations in order to create a feeling of tension. Others opt to stir up the feeling of brightness and astonishment by integrating vivid colours in their images, these qualities can be used to excite viewers with the over dramatic style but with this approach, is also important to ground the piece with context or otherwise it can be lost and end up looking like a sci-fir movie or dramatized piece of art.