Most clients come to me knowing they need “good renders”. Fewer know what they are buying, or what separates a useful visualization from an expensive one. This is the practical side: the decisions that affect budget, timeline and outcome. I rewrote it this year because the economics changed. The polishing stretch that used to dominate the schedule is now largely an AI pass, and that moves both the price and what you should ask for.
A decision-support tool. The obvious output is images. The actual value is faster alignment between stakeholders, problems found early, and marketing material that does its job.
A render that exposes a design issue before construction has already paid for itself. A visualization that helps a client understand a space, and commit to it, shortens the decision cycle. The pictures are how it ships.
Still images are the foundation. Photorealistic views, exterior, interior, aerial. Planning submissions, marketing, presentations. Priced per view, with the 3D model as a separate one-off line. Timeline: 2–5 days per image set once the model exists.
Variants of a view are the new cheap thing. A night or dusk version, a different season, a material option, a different furnishing style, generated from the approved view by my AI pipeline with geometry and camera locked, at a fraction of a new view. Ask for them. They used to cost almost as much as the original.
Compare:
AI images are a category of their own now: a photorealistic image from any 2D input (a sketch, a flat software export, an old render) and AI-furnished interiors from an empty 3D model. Cheaper per image than a modelled-and-rendered view, and no viewpoint you cannot see in the input. Right for concept stages and for a finished picture of every flat type on a sales sheet.
360° tours let viewers look around a rendered space. More engaging than stills for space-planning reviews and sales presentations; work on the web and in headsets. Priced per viewpoint, generated from the same 3D scene as the stills. Timeline: 3–7 days on top of the model.
Animation shows movement through a space. Essential when sequence and flow matter more than a frozen moment. Two grades: a full 3D animation, priced per second and rendered frame by frame from the model, and AI film at a lower rate per second, right for social loops and sales-office screens. Timeline: 1–3 weeks for a standard 3D piece; days for AI motion.
Interactive, web and VR run in real time: a web 3D viewer with variant sets, a configurator, a guided-tour presenter mode for the sales office, or a full Unreal Engine VR application. For high-value sales and detailed design review. Timeline: 2–6 weeks; VR quoted per project.
The four families, from one model: still, 360° tour, film frame, VR.
Not every project needs the same quality. Matching output to purpose keeps the cost sane.
Basic for early design phases, permitting and competitions: a correct, clean render without the finishing pass. Quick, cheaper, right for decisions that will change anyway.
Standard for most business needs: planning submissions, developer marketing, investor presentations. The finishing pass is included. This is where the cost/quality ratio is best, and where AI made the biggest difference.
Premium for high-profile marketing, signature projects, or material that has to hold up over a long campaign: hand-dressed interiors, specified materials, attention to every surface.
The model. The single biggest line, and the one that carries the precision. It scales with the building and with your input: a supplied 3D model halves it, a PDF or a sketch doubles it.
Number of views. More cameras mean more setup, rendering and review. Variants of an existing view are cheap; new views are not.
Interiors. Priced per square metre of model, a furnished flat roughly twice an empty one, which is why AI interiors from the empty model exist as a middle option.
Timeline. Standard timelines allow efficient scheduling; rush carries a fixed multiplier and compresses the iteration cycle.
Animation vs. stills. Frame-by-frame 3D animation is priced per second and needs real render time. AI film is priced per second too, at a lower rate.
How complete your input is. Clean CAD, clear material specs and good references mean less ambiguity and fewer corrections. Rough sketches and verbal descriptions work, but add iteration.
It changed the last stretch. Finishing, variants, interiors for sales sheets, upscaling to print, motion for social: all faster and cheaper than in 2024, and available as separate line items. I use it wherever it is faster, and mix it with the 3D model wherever geometry has to be exact. It did not replace the model, the camera decisions, or the judgement about what an image needs to say. If a supplier tells you the whole thing is now “AI-generated” and priced accordingly, ask them where the geometry comes from. My own answer, in detail: AI in Architectural Visualization: What’s Actually Useful.
One more thing to ask any supplier: whether the AI tools they use are licensed for commercial delivery, and whether your unbuilt project is being uploaded to a third-party service. Mine run on my own hardware, and each delivered file records the tools that touched it.
A clear brief. Materials decided before modelling starts. A flexible timeline. One 3D model reused across output types: the model built for stills becomes the basis for the tour, the animation and the web viewer. Batching views from the same scene. Asking for a variant where a variant will do.
You do not need perfect plans to begin. I work from whatever exists: CAD, PDFs, SketchUp, hand sketches with measurements. The more complete the input, the closer the first draft lands to the final.
The price list is public and the estimator builds a quote from it in a minute; the packages there, Puli for a single house through Komondor for a full sales platform, are the shapes most projects take. A thirty-minute call covers the rest. Get in touch.