Dell has sponsored this post.

Concept rendering of a keynote stage design. (Image courtesy of Lauren Smith.)

In May of 2017, Lauren Smith got her first glimpse of virtual reality. She was working as a production designer for the Citrix Synergy user conference, one of many corporate events that she has helped produce. For this particular expo, Smith had designed a plexiglass VR booth, a cubicle with a VR headset in the executive briefing center. Finished her work for the day, Smith volunteered to set up the headset and decided to try it out.

“I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I was hooked,” she recalled.

Hooked is no exaggeration. Today, Smith is a self-proclaimed visualization evangelist, running a site called Scenic Mentor to help other designers improve their rendering skills and spread the good word about VR. She remains a Senior Production Designer at Bellwether, the event production company behind her VR eureka moment, and is actively working to normalize VR in the industry. It’s not always an easy task.

“Not a lot of clients ask for virtual reality,” Smith lamented. The problem, she suspects, is not the technology—it’s human nature. “We love doing what we've always done. 2D renderings certainly work, but it’s only a matter of time until we see the better option.”

The Better Option

Lauren Smith, Senior Production Designer at Bellwether and founder of Scenic Mentor. (Image courtesy of Lauren Smith.)

Smith never intended to get into event design. Just like her discovery of VR, it was serendipity that brought her to the event industry.

In college, Smith studied drawing and painting with a minor in art history (her favorite artist is Kazimir Malevich, and his White on White is her favorite painting). During her studies, she started an internship for a historic preservation architecture firm in New York City, bussing to work from her school in New Jersey.

“I worked as a draftsperson in architecture for about four years,” Smith said. “But with no real aspirations to ever become an architect, I eventually needed something else.”

‘White on White’ by Kazimir Malevich is Lauren Smith’s favorite painting: “Even though it looks so simple, it’s actually very complex historically. I wrote a huge research paper in college on how it conceptualized and praised Leninism in Russia at the time. The artist started his own movement, Suprematism. So, the art wasn’t about making pretty pictures; it was a protest. The magic of this painting for me is that one artist with his little, relatively uninteresting painting, had the courage and influence to spark larger social change.”

Smith didn’t know what else she needed, but she knew what her skills were: computer aided design. Smith had become an expert in Vectorworks, a 3D CAD and building information modeling (BIM) platform. She went fishing on Craigslist with her Vectorworks experience as bait, and she got a bite: Lionfish Design, a New York City–based event design firm, hired Smith and introduced her to the industry.

“I had no idea that corporate event design was even a thing,” she admitted. “And it just so happened to be a perfect fit.”

The Big Small World of Event Design

An initial sketch for an event space. (Image courtesy of Lauren Smith.)

If you too are unfamiliar with the world of event design, don’t feel bad. The best event designs are bold, even beautiful; but bound for the background. Speaking as someone who’s been to his fair share of corporate events over the years, it’s all-too-easy to ignore the hard work that went into the keynote stage when high-profile corporate celebrities are standing on it.

Next time, I’ll take a moment to appreciate the craftwork of event designers like Smith, who is now a bona fide expert in the industry. After two years at Lionfish Design, Smith moved on to Arizona-based Bellwether, where she has worked for the past six years as a production designer. Stages are just one of many structures she has designed over the course of her career.

“I design structures, environments, anything that needs to be a custom build as opposed to a rental for a corporate event. So that might be registration areas, cool lounges, and then of course your typical keynote stage,” she described.

Lauren Smith designed this plexiglass VR booth for Citrix Synergy 2017, and inadvertently hooked herself on VR. (Image courtesy of Digital Blue Photography.)

Smith is part of a multi-disciplinary team that involves several producers, lighting designers, audio engineers and everybody else who comes together to pull off a corporate event. But as a designer, Smith is typically one of the first to begin working in the pre-production process.

“I’ll start with a series of pencil sketches to give [the client] a few options,” Smith elaborated. “When they pick an avenue, then I’ll use Vectorworks to come up with a very basic 3D model and I’ll save some wireframe perspective views. After that step, we will typically get it budgeted and then I’ll create a more photorealistic rendering. And for that I might work with Vectorworks’ built-in renderer, but more often than not, I’m going to be exporting it to Maxon Cinema 4D, and I’ve recently started using V-Ray with that.”

One of Smith’s designs rendered with Vectorworks for a broadcast set. (Image courtesy of Lauren Smith.)

Smith does all her work on a mobile workstation, which can run these 3D applications smoothly while also allowing her to travel easily from event to event. She recently upgraded to the Dell Precision 5750 Mobile workstation, packing an Intel Xeon W-10855M processor, NVIDIA Quadro RTX 3000 graphics card and 64GB of RAM. A mid-to-high range graphics card like the Quadro RTX 3000 is necessary for graphics intensive applications like VR.

Becoming a Scenic Mentor

In 2017, the same year she first discovered VR, Smith began a blog: Scenic Mentor. She wanted to share her knowledge of visualization tools with others in the event industry, because, as she discovered herself, that knowledge was hard to find.

“At the time I was just starting to learn Cinema 4D,” Smith said, referring to the popular 3D modeling and animation software. But Smith wasn’t interested in learning all the buttons and dials and functions and features of the complex application, at least not at first; she just had one particular goal.

“I wanted to create fly-through animations, which at the time were the coolest thing to give to your client as a design visualization product,” Smith remembered.

Trying to teach herself this one trick, however, was a bit like finding a needle in a haystack. “There were a bazillion tutorials on YouTube about Cinema 4D, all this crazy stuff that I didn’t need. In the events industry, we are just making a very particular style of stage rendering. It’s relatively basic. It was so frustrating,” Smith said.

Lauren Smith’s Scenic Mentor tutorials teach Vectorworks, Cinema 4D and Unity for the events industry. (Image courtesy of Scenic Mentor.)

Fed up with YouTube and its bottomless pit of irrelevant tutorials, Smith hired a Cinema 4D tutor named Joe Rule to teach her exactly what she wanted to know. The “original mentor,” as Smith calls Rule, taught her everything she needed to create fly-through animations for event design. Smith soon decided that aspiring event designers wouldn’t have to go through the same trouble—she would become a mentor herself.

“I spent so much time and energy learning this one bit of information. I’m going to put this online,” Smith decided. “Once the blog was started, I just ran with it. Anytime I found something that I felt was new technology or just useful or saved me time, I started writing it down. Eventually, I came upon VR.”

VR, by the way, has surpassed the fly-through as the coolest visualization a designer can give a client, in Smith’s opinion.

The Future of Event Visualization

Having spent her career pursuing new and better visualization techniques, most recently VR, Smith is excited to see what comes next. She points to real-time ray-traced rendering as a “huge game changer for designers” that has emerged within the last few years thanks to RT Cores, a processing component of NVIDIA RTX graphics cards that enables hardware accelerated real-time ray tracing.

“With the Dell Precision and NVIDIA RTX, I can create high-quality renderings fast with the convenience of a lightweight, portable laptop,” Smith said.

Those fly-through animations Smith began making back in 2017 used to require time-consuming, frame-by-frame rendering in advance of a demo. If Smith forgot a detail—say a light was off that was supposed to be on—she had to re-render it all over again. Now, the rendering is done on-the-fly-through, right in front of a client, and Smith can adjust any details she wants.

“Real-time rendering saves you so much of that headache,” Smith praised. “And with the advent of real-time ray-traced rendering with NVIDIA RTX I can deliver ever more realistic images for my customers.”

Another recent game changer for Smith is 360-degree images, which can now be exported from Vectorworks and other popular BIM software and viewed in a web browser. Compared to a 2D rendering, 360-degree images provide a much better sense of an event space, such as a booth for an expo, and how it fits in the broader environment.

“You can connect multiple 360 images to make a virtual tour, which is really cool,” Smith explained. “In the past you would have had to send the client several separate 2D images and they would each be from one viewpoint. And some people just aren’t visual people, and they don’t understand how those things match. But if you give them a virtual tour, it helps them build that relationship in their mind.”

Going from 2D renderings to 360-degree images is a big leap, according to Smith, but there’s an even bigger leap to be leapt. I think you can guess what it is.

“VR is the ultimate design visualization experience,” Smith proclaimed.

Lauren Smith’s first exposure to VR in 2017. It was love at virtual sight. (Image courtesy of Lauren Smith.)

Smith is confident that VR will soon be the norm for event design reviews with her clients. But as eager as Smith is to show off her designs in VR, she’s even more excited about the possibility of creating her designs in a virtual world.

“Instead of drawing on my computer or sketching on a piece of paper, I’m actually dropping 3D objects in while I’m in VR with my headset on,” Smith envisions. Even better than that would be inviting clients to be part of the process, she added, lighting up at the possibility.

“You know how much time that would save me? I think the client would really love that, because why wouldn’t they want to be more involved directly in the design process?”

If you’d like to be more involved in the event design process, you can learn from Lauren Smith at her blog Scenic Mentor. To learn more about Dell Precision Mobile workstations, visit dell.com/precision.