A PICTURE, OR 1000 WORDS?
Presenting your ideas so that clients can easily visualise them is always a challenge. Kevin Marsh outlines Grillo’s innovations helping end users to picture a project long before it comes to fruition.
ABOUT KEVIN MARSH
Kevin steers Grillo’s marketing and web efforts, ensuring a class-leading online experience and making client interactions easier, one click at a time.
They say a picture paints a thousand words. Some would say this means 1001 words are worth more than a picture. Either way, the old adage rings true, in our industry as in any. Communicating effectively with clients so they can easily envision your ideas is key to a successful project, and nothing communicates more effectively than an image.
But how to produce an image of a project that does not yet exist? Most of us don’t have the resources or know-how to produce photorealistic CGIs. And not all of us have a garden designer’s artistic skill to attractively and accurately sketch out the finished result. At Grillo, we are all too aware of the challenge of presenting our ideas to the end client. It’s something we’ve been working on for a while, and in early 2022, we had a bit of a breakthrough.
But how to produce an image of a project that does not yet exist? Most of us don’t have the resources or know-how to produce photorealistic CGIs. And not all of us have a garden designer’s artistic skill to attractively and accurately sketch out the finished result. At Grillo, we are all too aware of the challenge of presenting our ideas to the end client. It’s something we’ve been working on for a while, and in early 2022, we had a bit of a breakthrough.
The Grillo Configurator was an industry-first. No one had created an outdoor kitchen configurator before, and for the first time, designers could quickly and easily mock up kitchen layouts and see the price (including install) updating live to the side. It is a brilliant provision that continues to serve us and the industry well. But its simplicity and ease of use had a shortcoming – for the configurator to work, its visuals had to be 2D. And 2D is just a bit… not quite all there; 1 dimension short of reality.
So throughout 2021, whilst the website teams were working on perfecting the Configurator and improving the website, they always had one thing niggling at the back of their minds: How can we harness the simplicity of the current system, and apply it to a much more realistic and useable means of visualising our kitchens? And they found a way – enter the Grillo Configurator 3D Viewer and GrilloEye Augmented Reality Viewer.
So throughout 2021, whilst the website teams were working on perfecting the Configurator and improving the website, they always had one thing niggling at the back of their minds: How can we harness the simplicity of the current system, and apply it to a much more realistic and useable means of visualising our kitchens? And they found a way – enter the Grillo Configurator 3D Viewer and GrilloEye Augmented Reality Viewer.
3D and AR are yet another industry-first, and we’re incredibly pleased to offer this service to the trade free of charge. It’s a game changer for landscape professionals. Whereas before it was necessary to scrawl on the back of an envelope or try to cobble together a layout in Sketchup, now that layout can be viewed in 3D at the click of a button. And panned around, and zoomed it on, all in remarkably high-fidelity photorealistic rendering. Click the AR button and you can view the layout in its final position in the garden, using the power of augmented reality.
If you haven’t tried out the 3D and AR features yet, do give them a go. And if you have, let us know how you got on. We’re always on the lookout for new ideas. Hopefully that puts you in the picture… in considerably less than 1000 words!
Ready to start building?
Head to our online shop to browse the pre-designed Vantage layouts, or to build your own!
