In Response to Urban Growth Artists Impressions of the 20 storey buildings (April 2016)

Tags : Central to Eveleigh Density Done Well FSR GFA High Density High Rise North Eveleigh Precinct Urban Growth Urban Growth NSW

The Old Trick of using Wide-Angle lenses to distort space, distance and size. 

The new images on the Urban Growth website (April 2016) show some very nice pictures outlining how unobtrusive the new 20 storey buildings could be.

Unfortunately they don’t represent reality as the stills are taken with very Wide Angle Lenses (estimated 18mm) .  Human vision rests somewhere between 35mm and 70mm, depending on the size of the sensor/film aperture.

Wide angle lenses, commonly used in real estate brochures to make rooms look more spacious than they are, distort imagery in the following ways:

• They make objects further away appear a lot smaller
• They have a wider horizontal field of view
• This wider view can approximate our total peripheral vision but in doing so makes objects appear a lot smaller than in reality.
• Open your phone camera and point it in front of you. If its a newish phone it will have a lens around 26mm. Even this lens is quite wide and whilst built to take panoramic happy snaps you can easily see the difference between it and your own human vision.

3D Scale Model of North Eveleigh

So below we take the same pictures, in very similar places, instead with lenses which more approximate the human vision field of view. With Google Maps, containing site elevations, as our Floor Plan we made a 3D model of the proposed North Eveleigh development and positioned the camera in similar places.

Comparison of Lenses

A good way of telling if an image has been taken with a wide angle lens is looking at how distorted the edges are. We start with the golden grove example.

Golden Grove

Looking at the Original website example for Golden Grove you can see how distorted the edges are. Replicating this in our 3D program with a few trees and similar 2 storey buildings and terraces we get the same ‘pinched’ effect with our 19mm lens.

Now a 3D render from the same spot, just in front of the Abercrombie/GoldenGrove roundabout, with a 50 mm Lens. Not so unobtrusive….

CarriageWorks Way Entrance

This one is a little trickier as the artist has had to realign the 3d buildings so they appear straight with a process called UnLensDistort.

Now a 3D render from the same spot with a 26 mm Lens. Not so unobtrusive….

 

 

Wilson Street

This one was used as an example to show how the existing trees in the area hide the bad sightlines. More on that in another post.

I have moved our camera opposite the last terrace on Wilson adjacent to the public housing site just sold.

In the below render I have included the proposed 4 storey building along Wilson Street. (We really have to see plans for these apartments and whether they will be 2 storeys at Wilson Street and how they will react with the surrounding street scape. I have made them 3 storeys at wilson St which is good for the sight line but they are supposed to be two, Pity they added an extra level to the platform apartments)

 Clothing Store

This one is great, another unrealistic camera.

 

And the following render taken from the Iverys lane end of the park with a 44mm lens.

 

Urban Growth Artist Impressions (April 2016)