In recent weeks, two competing illustrations have popped up in different corners of the Internet. In one of them, eight silvery towers perch at the waterfront of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, like a fleet of sailboats waiting peacefully for their captains. In the other, swollen and clearly exaggerated buildings the color of sickly flamingos loom over a diminished Manhattan skyline, threatening to swallow their neighbors in a gluttonous fit.

Despite their differences, these two renderings depict the same development, called Greenpoint Landing. One illustration was created by the project’s developer several years ago to give a sense of the permissible size and scale on that site. The other was drawn by the project’s opponents just a few weeks ago. Guess which is which.

“The renderings presented to us at community meetings were coated in a gloss of trees and leaves and flowers, and translucent towers blending into the sky,” said Bess Long, a member of a group called Save Greenpoint, which created the sick-flamingo rendering. “Ours was to express the brutality.”

An architectural rendering is a premonition of sorts, an illustration of what a park or a bridge, an apartment building or an office tower, might look like, even before the first splash of concrete licks the ground. But its most important mission is not to show the girth of a building’s footprint or the shape of the windows; it is to gin up enthusiasm for a project, or to incite resistance.