How, with the help of a Mac and 3D software, HGTV’s Barry Wood helps home buyers uncover the hidden potential in ramshackle real estate.

Case Study: Barry Wood
Occupation: Architect and Designer
Gear: MacBook Pro, loaded with Autodesk AutoCAD and 3D Studio Max

When you’re house hunting and the homes that fit your budget are mostly fixer-uppers, it can be a wild stretch of the imagination to see how a run-down Victorian with tiny rooms and nearly zero closet space could accommodate all your needs. You want a modern dwelling with an open floor plan, space for guests, a home office, and a kitchen large enough for two people to prepare a meal together. But, unfortunately, the property you’re looking at seems like it was originally built for less, oh, shall we say, “demanding” individuals. The term “hovel” even comes to mind.

It’s at this point that New York architect and designer Barry Wood, wielding a MacBook Pro, swoops in to reveal to home buyers—in stunningly realistic 3D animation—exactly how a house could be transformed into not just a usable living space, but, in many cases, the home of their dreams.

Wood, whose “day job” is principle architect at his eponymous Manhattan firm, b.wood Architects, is a designer on Home & Garden Television’s Hidden Potential. On the show, home buyers tour three homes that are generally well within their budget but may not fit their needs in terms of size, layout, and—in most cases—move-in readiness. After they walk through each house, Wood takes them on a second tour: a 3D virtual walk-through of the same home, remodeled and redesigned to meet the their needs.

Wood makes this magic on Mac hardware running an array of Autodesk CAD apps, including AutoCAD and 3D Studio Max, as well as the software that renders the 3D designs, giving them their photo-realistic quality. At this stage in his design proposal, Wood says, “I don’t care about the color and the finishes until the layout is set down, because good decorating will never save a poorly laid-out plan.”

Of course, there’s more hardware involved than just Wood’s MacBook Pro—the rendering process alone requires high-powered computers and several hours to complete. But Wood says, he chose an Apple laptop “because I just love the look of the product, and that means something to me—there’s a value in that. And beyond that, the actual graphic ability is well documented. That’s why we really like to present the movies on the Mac because it looks good and the graphic ability 
is good.”

Behind The Scenses. Before Wood can create and render a 3D walk-through, he delegates a recon team to gather crucial data. “I send a couple of my design assistants out to the site to survey it and take 100 photos and every single measurement. Then they draw in AutoCAD the existing conditions and floor plans,” he says. Once that’s done, Wood says, “I take out my charcoal and start getting dirty.”

A scene from a 3D walk-through of a kitchen Wood designed for home buyers on Hidden Potential.
A 3D rendering of a modern bedroom design.

With his MacBook packed safely away, Wood first creates quick charcoal sketches of how each home could be remodeled—knocking down walls here, adding walls there.

After Wood creates his sketches, his design assistants work in two-dimensional AutoCAD and then use 3D Studio Max to transfer the emerging design into our world of three dimensions. The 3D rendering process is key here, Wood says, because without those extra bits of realism, you don’t get the feel of a real house. “As you know,” he says, “in every split second of a movie, every single shadow changes.” The software addresses these details during rendering, and the final result is a polished 3D virtual tour of the same home that the buyers are considering, as redesigned by Wood.

TIP: AutoDesk’s CAD apps are meant for design pros—with price tags and learning curves to match—but Wood says you can get some of the same 3D effects for your own remodeling projects using Google SketchUp (free, sketchup.google.com).

A 3D rendering of a modern bedroom design.

TV Time Wrap. No one who watches HGTV on a regular basis can fail to be impressed by the speed with which the designers and builders work to imagine and implement the remodel jobs featured on air. Wood, who used to be a designer on the Learning Channel’s Trading Spaces, estimates that each half-hour episode of Hidden Potential requires in the neighborhood of 50 hours of real time. Compared to his gig on Trading Spaces, where he designed one room per episode, Hidden Potential forces Wood to tap quite a bit more design ingenuity in a very short time frame. “For Hidden Potential, I design between six and eight rooms in the houses, and there are three houses, so I’m doing an average of 20 rooms per episode, instead of one.”

In the midst of furiously redesigning a trio of homes behind the scenes, using both pen-to-paper methods and 3D CAD software on his MacBook Pro, Wood and crew are also taping an episode of Hidden Potential.

The only saving grace perhaps is that on Hidden Potential, the home buyers are left to have the remodeling work done themselves, long after HGTV’s cameras stop rolling.

For the program schedule of Hidden Potential and to watch full episodes online, see www.hgtv.com. For more info about Barry Wood, check out www.barrywoodnyc.com.

Keeping Up With Barry Wood

The gadgets Wood relies on most—and the ones he lusts after—help him work faster and stay in touch with clients.

An admitted “Crackberry addict,” Wood can’t live without his BlackBerry, which helps him stay in close touch with clients and colleagues, even when he’s away from New York shooting on location for Hidden Potential. “I need some sort of forearm contraption where I just snap my arm out and the BlackBerry automatically goes back to my hand, “ he jokes.

He says he’d rather carry an iPhone, but that he needs a smartphone that behaves more like his Mac, allowing him to have multiple windows in the same app open simultaneously. That said, he assures us that he’ll get an iPhone when the third-gen iPhone comes out. By then, we suspect, there will be numerous solutions to help BlackBerry fiends like Wood make a smooth transition from one addictive device to the other.

Another gadget Wood would like to own but does not yet have, is a portable scanner with enough power to capture his charcoal-on-paper sketches in high resolution so that he could share them with others via email and capture them digitally for himself. “Say I do a random sketch, whether it’s in my planner, sketchbook, on a random piece of paper, you know, a page in a book—that’s all I have on me, and I want to get that sketch to someone ASAP, and I know I’m not going to be near a scanner or a computer for hours. So [an ultraportable scanner] is a great, great thing.”

TIP: Two Mac-friendly portable scanners reviewed recently in Mac|Life: the Docupen RC800 ($299.99, http://planon.com) and Neat Receipts For Mac ($179.95, www.neatco.com).