Architectural visualisation that sells a building before it exists

What this actually solves

A developer needs to sell units before there is anything to show. The site is a fenced rectangle, the finance depends on pre-sales, and the only things that exist are drawings. A floor plan is a legal and technical document, and reading one is a professional skill that a buyer is not expected to have. Shown a rectangle marked with dimensions, they cannot tell whether the living room is generous, what the window faces, or how the light falls in the afternoon. So they wait until the building is up, which is exactly the money the developer needed early.

A render closes that gap. It converts a drawing into something a non-specialist can judge at a glance and forward to whoever else has to agree. That is why a set of images can carry a launch, and why they are ordered before the sales suite is built rather than after.

There is a second buyer with a different need. An architect or a practice competing for a commission is being judged on a proposal alongside other practices, and the difference between a good scheme presented flatly and a good scheme presented convincingly decides the appointment. Here the images are not marketing collateral; they are the argument. The lighting choice, the time of day and the camera height carry the intent of the building, and getting those wrong makes a good design look ordinary.

How the work runs

1. Fix the scenes and read the drawings. Which viewpoints, what each one has to communicate, the time of day, the season and the mood, and what the images are for — brochure, hoarding, planning submission or website. This is where the quote comes from, because it is where the count of scenes comes from. Two to four days.
2. Prepare the model. Your CAD or Revit file imported and rebuilt into something that renders — geometry cleaned, construction layers stripped, materials reassigned, and the surroundings established, because a building floating in white is not a persuasive image. Context, adjacent buildings and terrain get built to whatever level of detail the camera will actually see. Three days to two weeks.
3. Set the camera, then the light. The camera decision is the one that makes or breaks the image, and it is a photographer's skill rather than a software one. Eye level rather than drone level unless the brief calls for an aerial, verticals kept vertical, and a lens choice that does not distort the facade. Lighting is then built for a specific hour and weather rather than left on a default, with interiors lit for the way the space is actually used. Two days to a week.
4. Materials and dressing. Surfaces given real behaviour — how the stone catches light, how the glass reflects the sky, how the timber grain runs — and the scene dressed with furniture, planting and the traces of occupation that stop it reading as a computer model. Every scene gets a test render at low quality first, because finding a lighting problem after a full-quality render has run is an expensive way to learn it. Three days to two weeks.
5. Render, then post-produce. Final quality output, then the composite pass where sky, people, vegetation and atmosphere are brought together, contrast and colour resolved, and the image finished for its destination. Animation adds a dedicated rendering stage that is scheduled around the frame count, not squeezed into the last afternoon. Two days to two weeks.
6. Review rounds, as defined in the quote. Consolidated feedback, applied together, re-rendered and returned. Then delivery at the resolutions and formats the brief named. Three days to a week.

What moves the price

The range is $300–$6,000/scene over 1–6 weeks, and three things place a given scene in it.

Interior or exterior. Interiors cost more, consistently. Everything is close to the camera and must survive inspection, the material count is far higher, the lighting is harder because it comes through openings and bounces, and every object in shot has to be chosen and placed.

Stills or animation. A fly-through is not a still with time added. It is every frame of its running time rendered, plus camera choreography, editing, grading and sound, and it is quoted as its own item with the rendering capacity broken out.

How much is settled. A scheme with finalised materials and a fixed massing renders once. A scheme still under design renders repeatedly, and that is a legitimate reason for a higher quote rather than a hidden cost, provided both sides say so at the start.

What usually goes wrong

Unlimited revisions are agreed to. Your eye improves every round. First it is the building, then the light, then the sky, then the weave of the sofa fabric — and every one of those is a fresh render costing hours. The quote states how many rounds are included, what happens after that, and what a round is, which is why this service does not end in the argument it usually ends in.

The camera is placed like a drone instead of a person. The default view from drone height flattens the facade, makes the building look like a model on a table, and tilts every vertical. Images that convince are shot at eye height with the verticals held straight, because that is how a buyer will actually stand in front of the building.

Animation is quoted as though it were stills. The frame count is the cost, not the length. Agreeing to a two-minute fly-through without scheduling the rendering time is how a delivery date gets missed for reasons that have nothing to do with the design, and it is why rendering capacity is a visible line in the quote rather than an assumption.