Royal London House

Eye-kon produced seven verified views from publicly accessible locations around the site, five at AVR Level 1 and two at AVR Level 3, all to Landscape Institute Type 4.

The viewpoints were selected in consultation with the project heritage, planning and landscape consultants and with the Cheshire East heritage officer, then confirmed on site. Each verified view presents a matched pair, the existing condition and the proposed development, from the same surveyed camera position.

The two Level 3 renders were placed where materials matter most: VP03 on Alderley Road near the main access, and VP10 looking south from Fulshaw Hall into the site. Every other viewpoint is a wireline.

Production Process

1 | Photography and survey

Photography was carried out across two sessions, in April and August 2025, both timed for clear weather. Full frame cameras were used on levelled tripods at 1.6 or 1.65 metres above ground level, with a 24 mm lens on every viewpoint and a horizontal field of view of 74 degrees. Camera make, lens, focal length, tripod height, date, time and lighting conditions were recorded for each.

Five of the seven viewpoints were surveyed with a Leica TS15 total station and a Trimble Catalyst GNSS system, recording Ordnance Survey coordinates and AOD levels for the camera position along with around twenty control points per view, spread through foreground, midground and background and reaching up to about 750 metres from the camera. Where permanent ground markings were not possible and there were no hard reference features to work from, the survey was carried out alongside the photography using temporary poles.

For the two remaining viewpoints, camera positions were established from on site measurements plotted against Ordnance Survey mapping, with ground levels taken from the topographic survey at the nearest surveyed point.

2 | 3D modelling and camera matching

Both buildings were supplied as FBX models by their respective architects and positioned using corner coordinates provided by the design team. The scene origin was moved to a local reference point at Easting 384000, Northing 380000, to avoid the floating point drift that occurs when working at full national grid values.

For the surveyed viewpoints a script generated the aligned virtual camera, rendered the control points for visual checking and produced a text summary of the data used. The remaining two cameras were positioned manually from the recorded coordinates. In both cases the alignment was refined by block modelling the existing building footprints and other identifiable features from the topographic survey, which gives a second, independent check that the camera is where the survey says it is.

3 | Material and lighting calibration

For the two Level 3 viewpoints, lighting was rebuilt with the V-Ray Sun and Sky system, calibrated to the site's latitude and longitude and to the time and date of each photograph. Materials including brickwork, concrete, glazing and metal cladding were developed in V-Ray from the specification and sample swatches supplied by the design team. Contextual shadowing, reflection and occlusion were simulated using simplified models of the surroundings.

4 | Verified view production

Images were composited in Adobe Photoshop following Landscape Institute Technical Guidance Note 06/19 and Appendix C of the London View Management Framework, including the 2015 erratum.

The Level 1 wirelines are built from alpha channels and mattes, with the linework scaled, colour coded and offset to stay within the true profile of the massing. The Level 3 renders are composited into the original photograph with foreground elements masked from the site photography and survey references.

Every view carries graticules at 10 and 1 degree increments and a marked optical axis. Camera locations, heights and reference data have been retained and can be revalidated.