Graeme Daley of Daley Renderings
Graeme Daley is founder of Daley Renderings, a design visualization firm.
How did you start your business?
Over the last five years, I’ve had the opportunity to work on a variety of landscape architecture and urban planning projects, including complete 3-D visualization renderings and video animations for project marketing and fundraising purposes. I always enjoyed bringing our clients’ projects to life before the shovel ever broke ground. These 3-D visualizations became powerful tools, gaining support from local jurisdictions on controversial projects and helping secure large donations for our nonprofit clients.
I recently decided that I wanted to focus my time on these 3-D design visualization services. Since I personally owned all the hardware (Quad-Core Workstation with 12 GB of RAM) and software (Autodesk CAD and 3-D Studio Max with a V-ray Render Engine) that I used to do this 3-D visualization work in the past, it was an easy transition to focus exclusively on marketing 3-D visualization work under the name
Daley Renderings.
How did you come up with the idea for your business?
Given the slowly recovering development industry and the fact that landscape architecture work locally continues to be sparse, freelancing 3-D visualization services was a natural move.
Properly executed 3-D visualizations can help projects gain interest and support from investors, jurisdictions, prospective tenants and other stakeholders. Showing everyone involved what a project will look like ensures that everyone is on the same page with a proposed project.
What resources here did you take advantage of and how did they help?
The resources I’ve called upon locally are my professional contacts in the architecture, development and real estate industries. As with any industry, you have to develop the personal relationships before people are going to feel comfortable doing business with you. You can send postcards and emails, but these days, you have to get on the phone and call people. It doesn’t hurt to spend a day driving a loop around the city to say “hi” to people you haven’t seen in a while and shake their hands. I think face-to-face interactions are essential to cultivating new business leads.
What inspires you?
Helping others improve their own businesses while advancing visionary projects is my mission. Daley Renderings can only be successful if the projects that I visualize are successful. This visualization work can help people take their company’s standard of presentation to a completely new level, which positions them to compete with larger design firms with more human and technology resources.
What’s next for you and your company?
With the recent creation of an in-house render farm, my capabilities have been increased exponentially. In the past, I’ve experimented with 3-D presentations in which one would wear 3-D glasses. I’m also looking into other types of output that can be created from these 3-D computer models that will go beyond standard digital video and printed marketing materials.
Interview by Robin Donovan