How do we make it fast and easy to populate renderings?
Howdo we make the defaults representative?
Can we balance automation and creativity?
At Dash Marshall we created People Party! to explore these questions.
Architects include human figures in their renderings to provide a sense of scale and to make the space feel alive. Scale figures are not the point of a rendering and yet, without them,the architecture you put so much time into conceptualizing will look like a ghost town. Filling images with people is a requisite step in the process, but fraught with potential challenges.
It takes forever to find the right people. It’s a pain to cut them out. It takes vigilance to make sure the figures match the demographics of the community in which your rendering is situated. It takes time to build a crowd that makes the image feel active. The results can be disappointing, empty, or simplistic.
At worst, this process is tedious and time consuming. At best, and with the help of cutout libraries, this‘necessary evil’ process can be expedient. Imagining the life of your building should not be rote cut and paste of scale figures, it should be a celebration that you’ve advanced your project and are making renderings that show your ideas in their best light.
People Party!is designed to address these pain point for architects. It’s an app to populate architectural renderings by automating time-consuming and dull aspects of the process so you can focus on being creative.
🏆 The People Party! Difference
📊Generative Populations. Renderings should reflect the true diversity of cities. If you’re making a rendering of Detroit, the people in your image should look like Detroit. PP! uses Census data to calculate the demographics and makes sure that the demographics of people in the scene are always representative as you grow and shrink their number.
🎨Semantic Palettes. You should not have to make individual decisions about the color of every shirt, shoes, and trousers in the image. That’s a sure way to reach cognitive overload. In People Party! you use color palettes that have semantic awareness. That means you define a set of colors that can be applied to shirts, for instance, and PP! does the work to choose a different one of those colors at random for every person in the scene. With just a few color selections you can generate zillions of combinations.
🎲Randomization Encouraged. Hit spacebar and let PP! randomize all of the colors in the scene. Hit‘p’ and PP! will randomize all of the people in the scene. As you cycle through randomizations, PP! keeps the demographics constant. By automating the hard stuff, we make it easy for you to be creative and exploratory until your image has just the right vibe.
We’re asking you try People Party! and share feedback about your experience.
Use a desktop for best results. It will kind of work on phone/tablet but you’re missing out unless you use a desktop.
🐙 The People behind People Party!
Who’s“we,” btw? We are Dash Marshall, a woman-owned + BIPOC-led architecture and strategic design studio based in Brooklyn and Detroit. This is a self-funded, self-initiated project. Shout to Eric Casthart, our frequent collaborator over the years, who led the development work in collaboration with our team.
👁👁 Please Share!
Use this beta for whatever you want to do with it, from client projects to academic assignments to playing around on a Saturday. Surprise us! You’re welcome to share imagery on social media and other channels.
If you tag your creations with @peoplepartyapp on Instagram or Twitter we will follow along.
💬 Feedback Welcome!
If you run into problems or have ideas, please share your thoughts and experiences with us by emailing makebetterrenderings@gmail.com.
And while we’re talking about feedback, although it’s unlikely to ruin your day if People Party! malfunctions, the app is *technically* under development so use at your own risk.
How do we make it fast and easy to populate renderings?
How do we make the defaults representative?
Can we balance automation and creativity?
At Dash Marshall we created People Party! to explore these questions.
🏆 The People Party! Difference
👉 http://beta.peopleparty.app
🐙 The People behind People Party!
👁👁 Please Share!
💬 Feedback Welcome!