# More than Archvis; Using Blender for Architectural Design

This short talk discusses my incredibly positive experience using Blender for Architectural design over the past 6 years, both as a student on small design/build projects, and as the lead designer for two sustainable prefabricated cottages in northern Ontario, Canada.

It also covers the an overview of my current Master Thesis research which explores how Blender could have a serious impact on Architectural design workflows as an artist friendly tool that gives designers high quality visuals and flexible parametric and procedural modeling capabilities (through Modifiers, Drivers, and the exciting developments in the functions branch). This research also investigated the areas of Blender that could be improved to better facilitate architectural design, which resulted in the development of MeasureIt-ARCH, (a modified version of Antonio Vazquez MeasureIt addon) which improves the behavior of the dimension element to make them easier to manage for architectural drawings. (Videos of the changes can be found at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCar6mE…). MeasureIt-ARCH aims to add dimensioning tools to Blender in a way that fits with Blender overall design, breaking some of the inefficient and restrictive workflow conventions of current day CAD software, like workplane based dimensions.

The thesis also briefly covers greater adoption of Blender as a design tool in the architectural profession could provide greater security for, and facilitate greater engagement with 'Open-Source Architecture' (OSArc) initiatives and projects (like the wikihouse project), providing them with the means to truly meet their Open-Source mandate and free them from the restrictions of having to share their collaborative projects in closed proprietary formats.