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I recently introduced Piranesi to the students of a digital design course I taught at UC Berkeley's Department of Architecture. When I played a movie that I had downloaded from the Piranesi Web site, demonstrating the features and capabilities of the program, it was, literally, a jaw-dropping experience for the students. A number of them commented that it was the best thing they'd ever seen. There is, of course, quite a stretch between viewing the capabilities of a software product and becoming proficient enough with it to be able to create the kind of quality work showcased in a demo. This is particularly true for Piranesi, which is more aligned with graphic-art tools such as PhotoShop and Illustrator than the traditional CAD and modeling tools architects are used to.
What is Piranesi?
Named after the foremost Eighteenth Century architectural draftsman, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the application originated as a research project in the Architecture school at the University of Cambridge in England, UK Piranesi is a specialized application for architectural sketch rendering, the only one of its kind. It is best described as Photoshop customized for architectural renderings. Unlike the 2D file formats generated and used by traditional image-editing programs in which a 3D scene is totally flattened out to a 2D image, Piranesi uses the EPix (Extended Pixel) file format in which each pixel stores depth and material information in addition to color. This means the individual 2D planes making up a 3D scene exist and can be separately selected and then applied a color or texture, and the program automatically adjusts the size of a texture and the shade of a color along the plane according to its depth. Thus, applying a tile texture to a wall in a perspective view will automatically paint larger tile sizes closer to the view, with the sizes receding along the vanishing point of the view.
Built on this base functionality, Piranesi has several tools, features, and special effects that let you take a plain computer-generated view and transform it to a sophisticated, artistic-looking rendering, in varied styles reflecting different moods. Once complete, the rendering can be exported in any common 2D image file-format such as JPEG or TIFF.
How It Works
You start in Piranesi with a...