Some projects live entirely on screens. This one points at a building. My client was preparing a proposal for a temple design competition, a structure intended for construction in the coming years, and needed the design to exist as more than drawings. My part was to translate their architectural sketches into a 3D model that could carry the proposal.
Sketches are a direction, not a specification
Working from hand-drawn sketches is a different discipline than working from CAD. A sketch gives you intent: silhouette, rhythm, the feeling of proportion. It does not give you dimensions that survive contact with 3D space. Curves that read beautifully on paper collapse when they meet symmetry, and details that feel minor in elevation become dominant in perspective.
So the process became a conversation. Model, render, compare against the sketches, adjust. My client refined the drawings as the model revealed what worked, and the model followed the drawings in return. It took time, and it took many iterations, but each round moved the design somewhere neither the sketch nor the model could reach alone.
Light as a design tool
A temple is experienced as light as much as form. The stained glass interior became its own study: how color enters the space, how it moves across surfaces, what it does to the sense of stillness the architecture is reaching for. These renders did real work in the proposal, because they show what the drawings could only suggest.
The result
We reached a model that holds up from every angle the jury might take, and that stays true to the sketches it grew from. Whether the temple gets built is now in the hands of the competition, but the design exists, precisely, in space. There is something satisfying about 3D work that might one day cast a real shadow.
More frames from this project are in the Bahai 3D case study.