Key Takeaways:

• ‍Story-first rendering reshapes critiques into lived-space conversations. D5 lets students test light, materials, and user flow in real time instead of debating abstractions on plans and elevations.
• ‍High-fidelity, real-time iteration accelerates learning in weeks, not semesters, moving work from rough tests to confident compositions as the near-final viewport sharpens judgment on scale, detail, and atmosphere.
• ‍For resource-constrained LATAM studios, LiveSync + a 13k+ built-in library + AI capabilities shift scarce hours from exports and asset hunting to design intent—making formal adoption realistic.

Educator Overview:

• Name: Sidney Eros Aguirre Vásquez
• Country: Chile
• Position: Instructor at UFT (Universidad Finis Terrae)
• Teaching Course: Taller Espacio 1 - Workshop digital - Taller proyecto 2 - Operación Sostenible Territorio
• Previous Workflow: Revit/SketchUp/Rhino + V-Ray, Enscape, Lumion, Twinmotion
• Now Using: Revit, SketchUp, Rhino + D5 Render

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Sidney Eros Aguirre Vásquez went from architecture student to D5 Campus Ambassador to D5 Educator—showing how accessible tools, supportive administrators, and a storytelling‑first pedagogy can reshape how Chilean students learn visualization.

Cold Open — When Real‑Time Rendering Makes Designs Come to Life

The classroom went quiet, then loud. For the first time, students stepped inside their own projects on screen, walking a corridor they had only drawn, testing light on a façade they had only imagined. Tree canopies shifted, shadows stretched, textures snapped into place. What began as a pin‑up turned into an inhabitable scene.

“Their designs, for the first time, come to life. They can inhabit them, walk through them, and measure them.”

That first session with D5 did more than impress; it changed how critiques unfolded. Instead of debating abstractions, the studio talked about experience: where the sun lands at 4 p.m., how wood meets concrete at eye level, what the user feels moving through space. High‑fidelity preview made the conversation honest—students iterated on lighting, materials, and cameras with visuals that felt meaningfully close to the final output.

Origins in Santiago

Sidney’s story begins in Santiago. He studied architecture at Universidad Finis Terrae (UFT) from 2019 to 2024 and graduated with highest distinction, earning the Vince in Bono Malum prize—a master’s scholarship at the same university.

The city doubled as his visual classroom. He knows the north and south of Chile by heart, and he added range with two study trips to São Paulo and Brasília, plus a holiday in Florianópolis. At UFT’s Faculty of Architecture and Design (FAD)—where art and architecture share a table—he learned to treat images as more than output.

On modeling, he dabbled in SketchUp for a time without much success, then settled into Rhino 7/8 as his primary workspace. Recently he has been testing ArchiCAD, though he hasn’t made the same progress there as in Rhino.

On rendering, the path was incremental. In 2020 he tried V-Ray, but the materials, configuration, and control panel felt confusing and hard to apply; he shifted to Twinmotion and found the quality too limited for his aims; then came Enscape—the last renderer he relied on before D5—always finishing with post-production in Photoshop.

“D5 helped me tell stories with images, beyond whether they were pretty or ugly. There is a dialogue between the image, the project, and the client.”

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Discovery and the Three‑Week Leap with Real‑Time Rendering

Sidney tried D5 in fourth year (Studio 9), drawn by its education access and the promise of speed. He already knew rendering, but the shift was immediate: a built‑in asset and material library he could pull from on the fly, and real‑time feedback that made lighting and camera decisions tangible in real time. In 2023, his portfolio changed shape—and that momentum continued with a refreshed render this year. For students, that velocity is everything: a native, continuously updated library of 13k+ models, PBR materials, HDRIs, vegetation, particles, and scatter/terrain presets means less file hunting and more design.

Ambassador to Educator

Graduating as a D5 Campus Ambassador, Sidney faced a choice: let the connection fade or lean in. He chose the latter. Staying close to the community opened a path to teaching at his alma mater.

“You have to seize opportunities and make the most of them,” he says. Sharing tools and strategies in a competitive field is part of the motivation, but teaching inside the same school adds weight. Administrators listened, and peers—especially younger ones—saw a native approach to digital practice.

Teaching philosophy: storytelling over output

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Sidney’s lens is simple and demanding: design from the image. Plans and references matter, but so do environment, context, material, color, and the user who inhabits the space. Real‑time rendering makes that whole set legible. High‑quality viewport lighting and reflections help students judge scale and material interaction honestly during iteration, not just at the end.

Student impact in Latin America (and why D5 helps)

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Time is tight in Latin American studios. That’s where integration and intuitiveness count. With LiveSync connectors for SketchUp, Revit, Rhino, and 3ds Max, students update geometry, materials, and cameras instantly—no export/import choreography—so scarce studio hours go to design intent rather than file wrangling.

D5’s AI further reduce friction: AI Atmosphere Match aligns sky and lighting to a reference in a click; AI PBR Material Snap and auto texture‑map generation get materials most of the way there; AI Enhancer handles clean, photography‑aware post. The effect is pedagogical, not just technical—students spend more time deciding why a space should feel a certain way, because the how is faster.

And because the built‑in library is deep and curated—assets, PBR materials, HDRIs, vegetation, particles, scatter and terrain presets—learners can prototype believable scenes quickly. They see cause and effect immediately; iteration becomes a design habit, not a scheduling risk.

Faculty dynamics and administrative buy‑in

Not everyone moves at the same pace. Sidney sees some skepticism among “digital” colleagues, where loyalties to specific software can harden. Yet the school’s leadership is pushing a radical transformation, aiming to give students tools that match the realities of practice. That alignment matters: supportive administrators created space for workshops, and results from those short sprints did the persuading.

Before/after proof

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Sidney uses a simple timeline to make the progress clear. He saved three sets of images: (1) early tests from June 2, 2023; (2) the images he presented at his end‑of‑semester review on July 11, 2023 (the “final crit”); and (3) a new version rendered this year. Seen side by side, the improvements are easy to spot: cleaner, more consistent lighting; materials like wood, concrete, and glass that read more realistically; better‑composed camera angles; and small additions—people, trees, and context—that make the scene feel lived‑in.

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In class, this comparison works as a teaching tool. Students can see how a few targeted choices—sun direction and exposure, texture scale, depth of field, and the inclusion of human scale—change how a space is perceived. Because D5 updates in real time and the interactive preview looks very close to the final export, students can try an idea, see the result immediately, and make the next decision without long waits.

What’s next for the curriculum

Workshops of two or three sessions have been the on‑ramp, but the conversation is moving toward formal inclusion. The team is exploring D5 as the default engine for undergraduates, with the possibility of a postgraduate track that ties rendering to research and professional practice. D5 free education licenses for students and educators lower the barrier for schools piloting new coursework.

From Santiago’s studios to Latin American classrooms, Sidney’s path shows what happens when accessible tools meet a storytelling mindset and institutional support. The result is not only better pictures, but better conversations about space—and students who can stand inside their ideas, earlier and more confidently.

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