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They’re a common sight in architectural renderings.

Perhaps it’s a woman strolling while talking on a cellphone, a businessman carrying a briefcase, or a bicyclist. All are real people who appear in photographic form to populate a scene that doesn’t yet exist.

This rendering “entourage” lends scale, provides a human connection to the viewer and tells the story of who might use or interact with the proposed building. It’s a mighty weight on the shoulders of these cutout people, so they are chosen carefully.

“Say a rendering takes 40 hours to produce 鈥� at least 20 of those are spent on the entourage,” said Walker Templeton, a senior project designer with SERA Architects. “You want the people in the image to portray the mood, the style, the lifestyle of the building you’re producing.”

Portland-area architecture firms gather the people photos from a variety of sources, and store them in portfolios of images that can be used in a variety of settings. Some websites offer free downloadable cutout people images taken using models and organized into categories like “summer,” “guitar,” “coffee” and “happy.” Others offer a combination of free images and downloadable packages for a fee.

Designers also often perform simple web image searches and crop people out, or take their own pictures using firm staffers as models. There’s also an element of playfulness involved, such as the subtle insertion of Clint Eastwood or David Bowie into a rendering.

Certain renderings by GBD Architects of the Hassalo on Eighth project in Portland’s Lloyd District feature Darth Vader riding a Segway, said Taylor Bailey, a GBD designer.

“We kind of hid him in the scene,” he said. “If you look closer, you can find gems.”

Age, diversity and clothing are among the most important factors when choosing an entourage, Portland designers say. Out-of-style clothing could make a rendering look dated instead of contemporary. Architects also pay close attention to the age demographic that a project is targeting and choose images of people that match that.

Although the most common entourage members are people with simple clothing who don’t draw much attention to themselves, a more flamboyant person can be used to pull the viewer into a particular element of the building design.

“Sometimes you need those distracting elements, like a kid with balloons or a guy breakdancing,” Bailey said. “It gives the scheme a narrative.”

In the early stages of design, Templeton said he prefers to use shadowy silhouettes or transparent figures because photographs of actual people have a strong impact on clients.

“They will zoom in on the people in the image,” he said. “They will not make a single comment on the architecture. They will only talk about the people in the image, so I’ve learned to be very careful about how I choose people.”

Remembering who will use the space is important, said Dmitriy Molla, a designer with the Portland office of SRG Partnership. When he was working on renderings for the Hillsboro Hops stadium project, a simple observation led to considerable revisions.

“I wasn’t really paying attention to the kind of people I put in there,” Molla said. “Somebody pointed out Hillsboro is actually quite a diverse place and I’d placed mostly white people in there, so I went back and put more Hispanic people in there.”

One client critique of early renderings SERA created for a renovation of the University of Oregon’s Erb Memorial Union in Eugene was that no one was wearing a backpack, Templeton said. So the firm bought a package of cutout images of people wearing backpacks. There was just one problem. All of the images were of schoolchildren.

“We needed a 20-year-old with a backpack, so we had to look online and find images,” Templeton said.

When SERA staffers decided to include the Oregon Duck mascot in a few of the EMU renderings, university officials wavered on whether that was an appropriate addition, Templeton said.

“That was a big discussion point,” he said.

He remembers another time when he created a rendering for the interior of a building and inadvertently included a person with a cigarette.

“That was a big deal because you weren’t supposed to be smoking in the building,” he said.

Because most renderings contain a composite of people images pulled from a variety of sources, one of the trickiest parts is making them fit the scene, said Nathan Katten, an associate with landscape architecture and urban design firm Walker Macy. This includes ensuring that the figures are shaded similarly.

“That can be really challenging to try and gather an entourage that’s all downloaded from different places and make them all look like they belong in the same image,” he said.