Creating Impressions...

By Abdul Bari

Architect Urban Designer

There is generally an institutional resistance to adopting new technologies. But technological advancement for attaining a higher efficiency and a better quality output has been a constant endeavour at Design Atelier Urbis. Following the incorporation of Autodesk Revit in the design studio, and the development of a customized work smart studio management system codenamed ‘CONCERT’ to monitor studio activities, there was casual experimentation of a lesser known software application by Autodesk named ‘Impression’. And the outcome is what you see below!

We found Autodesk Impression to be a much lighter and easy to use alternative to Adobe Photoshop for making attractive and legible design illustrations like master plans, landscape schemes, rendered elevations & sections, views, etc. The software was tested on variety of projects of different scales and types;  from a 10 Acre housing scheme to a 150 Acre integrated township to a schematic industrial landscape for a Power Plant; and was found to be twice as fast as Photoshop in delivering a product of the same (maybe even better) quality. A very handy application indeed during the crunch! 

Further ‘impressive’ aspects of the application are its compatibility with other drawing/graphic formats and its block library. It imports, and even identifies layers from .dwg and .psd formats, allows for .dwg links to be updated at any stage of the work, and gives high resolution outputs in JPEG, PDF, PSD, TIFF and other standard formats. The block library is populated with ready to use plans and elevations for Trees, human figures, automobiles in different presentation styles. The drag-and-drop interface for the blocks makes for very quick working. Downside - the application crashes very easily, which means you can lose a lot of work in an instant and without warning! Though there are intelligent ways of finding one’s way around it, like packing the elements in your layers and importing clean geometry into your workspace. Moreover, we hear there’s a new release which is more stable and high performance.

So, our stance is that if you’ve got the resolve and enjoy making pretty illustrations and rendered drawings, this software will go a long way in creating lasting first impressions!

Presentation Credits: Abdul Bari, Rajarshi Das & Sarvesh Jaiswal