Top 5 Reasons Blender is useful for Architectural Design

A few months ago, I released a course with Futurly on Architectural Design with Blender. It focused around generating a Beach Pavilion and the course aims to build a solid understanding of how to work with Blender’s unique toolset for architectural design. In case you are interested in the course, you can view it here. Within the course, and the subject of creating an architectural design, this course (along with all my courses) delve into how to use Blender effectively for architectural design. It’s really amazing that such a powerful software is free and open source, available to anyone and everyone!

So let’s list the top 5 reasons why Blender is useful for architectural design.

Prior to that, in case you wondering whether, Blender is a suitable tool for architecture, here is a video highlight how I have used Blender professionally.

Here are the top 10 aspects on using Blender for Architecture

1. It’s fast

Blender includes modifiers which replicate most of the situations where something more complex would be needed, like array a series of objects, mirror, or deform. If working in Sketchup or Rhino, doing something as simple as mirroring one half of the object would either require plugins (Sketchup), or using a script (Grasshopper for Rhino). Whereas in Blender, modifiers are a one-button click to some of the most common functions available.

My favourite modifiers are Boolean, Array, subdivision, solidify, and curve. All modifiers are non-destructive, meaning that they modify the geometry, but the base geometry can still be edited as if there are no modifiers on top of it.

Here is a screenshot of all the modifiers that can be used. This is a very simple model with Mirror, and then array modifiers, in such that editing one area, will edit all of them. Also, highlighted are all the modifiers that are useful for design.

Here is a beginners overview that shows the basics of Blender ond some of the uses of modifiers, like the three dimensional array in the thumbnail image of the video. It is composed of three array modifiers - one for the X direction, one for the Y, and one for the Z.

If you would like to find out more information about modifiers, check out this video by blenderbash, who lists an overview of all modifiers in 10 minutes. It is a good reference video in case you may wonder what one of the modifiers may be doing.

Yep, and this is the top feature, and there’s rarely a case where I am not using a modifier (or multiple) on my projects.

2. Sculptural freedom

Blender is a mesh-modeling program, where the mesh topology of vertices, edges, and faces can directly be edited. This gives an immense amount of freedom to model any shape you want. Want to pull a vertex around, go for it. An edge or an edge loop? Sure! A Face or face loop? Yep!

By sculptural freedom, I don’t mean digital sculpting like in ZBrush (or even Blender), but the fact the mesh-modelling gives design freedom so it is almost like “sculpting”

By contrast, NURBs modeling in Rhino, Autocad, Revit, etc requires the user to start with a curve, or multiple ones extrude, or loft between curves, intersect, and then continue. It is quite a tedious process.

If you are curious to understand how Blender can be used

At the same time, Blender can be as precise as you want it to be with snapping system, and a sidebar that allows the user to enter the exact XYZ coordinate of any object, vertex, edge, or face.

If you are interested to learn more about how to design with Blender, check out this video (or almost any other video on my youtube channel)

3. Rendering and visualisation

Blender includes both a Raytracing engine called Cycles that produces industry standard renderings. It is very comparable to VRay and Corona, and once again it’s completely free!

Blender also includes Eevee, a more recent real-time rendering engine that allows models to be much more interactive. In terms of architecture, Eevee is really useful for creating animations, whereas Cycles is useful to make concept white renders and all the way up to hyper realistic architectural visualisations.

In case you are interested to learn how to use Blender and Cycles for architectural visualizations , check out this video

4. Community and addons

Blender’s community is huge. There are numerous forums and places to ask for technical question, see art, or get addons that enhance Blender’s functionally. The best community resource for Blender are:

• blenderartists.org, the most popular forum

• blender.stackexchange.com - the best place to ask technical questions about Blender’s usage

• blendermarket.com - the most popular paid addon platform for Blender addons, assets, courses, etc

• gumroad.com - best place for both free and paid assets for Blender. The link here is actually one to show all Blender related assets, as gumroad is a general digital asset marketplace, not exclusive to Blender.

When it comes to addons, many community one come bundled with Blender. With so many places, and so many resources, it can be easy to become overwhelmed though. So here is a video of the best addons that come with Blender.

My favourite addons.

Boy, this is hard to list! There are so many good ones! But the ones I find almost indispensible to my workflow are:

• Tissue - an addon that comes bundled with Blender for generating parametric tessellations. I use it all the time, and it is great for architectural design. It can be used for facades, for city blocks, for really beautiful architectural concepts.

• Sun Position - another addon that comes with Blender that allows to place a sun with precision through providing Latitude and Longitude of the location, and then being able to sate the day and time for sun location.

• BlenderBIM - part of IFCOpenShell addon that gives Blender BIM superpowers for both combining multiple IFC models and have native IFC authoring at the go. This may not be most useful for conceptual design (my specialty) but it is definitely highly useful for the typical AECO processes (architecture, engineering, construction, and operation)

• Botaniq - a paid addon with vegetation assets for populating your scenes. It has a really good balance of quality and size of models

• Traffiq - a paid addon with car models from the same creator as Botaniq. Again, quite a good balancy between quality and not-too-large models

5. Geometry Nodes

Last, but most certainly not least is Geometry Nodes. As a fairly new feature, it is Blender’s answer to Houdini and Grasshopper for Rhino. Geometry Nodes offers vast procedural modeling capabilities beyond what the rest of the modifiers offer.

Also, Geometry nodes is technically a modifier too, so it can be used in the modifier stack, the same geometry nodes tree can be used on multiple objects, and even multiple geometry nodes modifiers can be used on the same objects.

Although it can be a little daunting at first, there are numerous amazing creators on youtube highlighting how to use Geometry Nodes for different cases. As with the rest of my videos, I make tutorials of how it can be used architectural design.

Here is a video showing how to create modular buildings and even cities with geometry nodes.

That’s my list! Of course there are also many other aspects that are super useful for architectural design within Blender.

If you are interested to know how you can use Blender for architectural design, check out one of my courses which can aid you in getting proficient with Blender fast.

What is your favourite Blender feature?