After architectural visualisers received a bad rap from Aaron Betsky and Es Devlin, Troy Hodgson defends his profession and explains why renderings don't always exactly match the finished buildings they portray.

As the cost of a full architectural education and qualification increases and the profession contracts, new careers and spin off industries are being forged on the periphery of architecture itself ? linked and engrained in design, but divorced from the practicing of every-day architecture.
In practice we learn about design and we may learn to design ? but we are also expected to rapidly understand the workings of everything from the detail of a door handle to the demographics of a city.
Hodgson's visualisation firm Darcstudio creates atmospheric renderings for architects like Peter Zumthor Stifled by this overwhelming expectation to be an expert in so many separate fields, at so many separate scales, it is easy to forget how to effectively communicate the core product of practice to our audience prior to its delivery.
Some of us find ourselves in practice becoming more engaged by this strain of communication than the creation of the product itself. This typically starts out by being "the one" who produces drawings and nice sketches, and further down the rabbit hole can end up working with 3D software to produce visualisations, either in-house, or moving to a specialist architectural visualisation studio.
Our work is sometimes blamed for the delivery of ba...