Design Visualisation


We live in a highly visual culture, surrounded by photorealistic virtual worlds in cinema, television and advertising.

This specialisation will equip students to work in the field of design visualisation. Students will learn theories of colour, lighting and composition and advanced techniques in analogue and digital modelling and rendering. Students will be equipped to prepare compelling visions of imagined environments through 3D digital models as well as traditional hand drawing techniques, and will be introduced to an examination of the history of image-making of cities, buildings, landscapes and performance design.

The skills learned in the Digital Visualisation specialisation will prepare students for work in specialist design visualisation companies, and help to hone their portfolios for job and masters applications.

Students wanting to complete a specialisation in Design Visualisation should complete both of the following. Subjects can be completed in any order.

GDES30004 Design Visualisation: Analogue (Offered in June)

This subject builds on the knowledge and skills acquired in the pre-requisite subjects, aiming at further developing the student’s critical and technical skills in the representation of design through drawing and model making. Students are introduced via lectures to a range of visualization precedents and in workshops to analogue model making, painting and drawing techniques. Scale models, perspective drawings and renderings are generated which can then be imported into the digital realm to be further developed. The outcome will be the beginning of a portfolio of images demonstrating the student’s capacity to express design ideas fluently and articulately.

ARCH30005 Design Visualisation: Digital Technologies (Semester 2)

This subject brings together practical know-how and critical thinking around the field of digital visualisations of space using industry standard software. Building on the digital representational and design skills acquired in the pre-requisite subject, students will learn the principles of colour, material mapping, lighting, composition, entourage, story boarding, rendering and animation techniques. Students will acquire new skills for building digital models, setting up ‘cameras’, adding ‘entourage’ (people, vegetation etc) with post-production across an ecology of software. The subject will be delivered through a series of lectures, specialist software workshop led by industry expert and tutorials. The outcome will be a portfolio of image rendering and animation positioned within a critical theoretical context of image-production in contemporary design practice. Concluding each lecture and workshop, students will be introduced to self-teaching modules that will enable further experimentation with media and technique

Need enrolment assistance?

Stop 1 provides enrolment and other support to Bachelor of Design, Bachelor of Environments and Melbourne School of Design students.