Albert Street

Eye-kon was appointed to produce the Accurate Visual Representations the assessment would rest on. Ten verified viewpoints, five at AVR Level 1 and seven at AVR Level 3, with the two Windsor views produced at both levels so a reader can move between a measured outline and a rendered image of the same frame.

The brief was straightforward to state and unforgiving to execute. Every camera position surveyed, every image reproducible, and nothing in the final files that could not be traced back to a coordinate.

Twelve viewpoint positions were originally identified across this site and the neighbouring corner at Windsor Road. Two of them, on Windsor Road and Chalvey Road East, carry no view of this site at all and were scoped out after review, which is why the numbering here runs to twelve but the set is ten.

Production Process

1 | Photography and survey

Baseline photography for the town centre views was shot on a full frame DSLR at a fixed eye level of 1.6 metres, timed for clear weather. Camera positions and ground control points were surveyed using a Leica Total Station and GNSS equipment, referenced to OSGB36, with ten to twelve control points per view spread deliberately through foreground, middle distance and background.

Windsor was handled differently. Photography inside the Castle grounds is tightly controlled, so the two strategic views use the approved camera locations and survey package issued by Slough Borough Council. That avoided further work on a sensitive site and kept the baseline consistent with imagery the authority had already accepted.

2 | 3D modelling and camera matching

FAL supplied the building as a DWG model. It was positioned using the corner point Ordnance Survey coordinates provided by the architects and checked against the surveyed framework, with the highest point of the proposal at +57.05 metres above Ordnance Datum.

Working at full Ordnance Survey coordinate values introduces floating point drift in 3ds Max, so the scene origin was moved to a local reference point at Easting 497500, Northing 179550. Geometry then holds its position and the model reads correctly against the survey. Virtual cameras were rebuilt to match the lenses used on site, a 24 mm tilt shift for the street level views and a 50 mm for the strategic ones, then aligned to the surveyed control points using camera matching and parallax analysis.

3 | Material and lighting calibration

Lighting was reconstructed with the V-Ray Sun and Sky system, set to the site's latitude and longitude and to the date and time recorded for each photograph, so the shadows in the model fall where the shadows in the photograph fall. Materials were developed from the architect's specification: the variegated red brick, the relief detailing, the dark balustrades to the balconies.

The Windsor views needed one further step. At 2.5 km and 6.9 km, a photograph carries atmospheric depth that a clean render does not, so a light volumetric haze was introduced and calibrated by eye against the baseline. It was kept deliberately short of anything that would alter how large, how near or how visible the building appears.

4 | Verified view production

The final images were composited in Adobe Photoshop, following Landscape Institute Technical Guidance Note 06/19 and the London View Management Framework. The Level 1 wirelines answer the first question, which is where the building is and how much of it can be seen. The Level 3 renders answer the second, which is what it is made of and how it settles into what is already there.

Where cumulative effects were relevant, the consented but unbuilt schemes at Queensmere, The Future Works and Station Square were added as red wireline overlays, built from published planning information and placed in the same coordinate framework.

Every image carries graticules at 10 and 1 degree increments and a marked optical axis. Camera locations, heights and reference data have been kept, so any view in the set can be revisited and checked.