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Elis Kostabi
Project manager
Architectural visualization
that sells the building before it exists.
3D Studio is an architectural visualization studio working for architects, developers and interior designers since 2013. Photoreal exteriors, interiors, aerials, animation, 360° tours and 3D floor plans, produced from the drawings your team is already working in.
- Fixed price quote in 30 minutes, from the drawings you have
- Clay stage first, so the camera is agreed before the expensive work
- 4K delivery standard, full usage rights included
We only take a limited number of projects each month, so every scene gets top quality.
The short version
What is architectural visualization?
Architectural visualization is the craft of showing a building before it exists: accurately enough to approve a design from, and convincingly enough to sell from.
You send drawings, materials and a sense of the mood. We rebuild the geometry, dress it with the specified materials, light it to a real time of day and render it at photographic quality. What comes back is a building that has not been built yet.
The words move around (architectural rendering, 3D visualization, archviz), but the job is one thing: the moment a client, a planning committee or a prospective buyer first sees the scheme. Get that moment right and a design is signed off in one round instead of five, and a development sells units before the foundations are poured.
Which is why we do not treat a render as a picture at the end of a project. It is usually the highest-leverage thing produced during it.
Why studios send us their drawings
A visualization earns its place three times over.
01
It wins the approval
Planning committees and boards do not read elevations the way architects do. An image that shows the scheme in its real street, at a real time of day, with the neighbouring buildings honestly represented, answers the objection before it is raised.
The same set carries into investor decks and funding applications without being remade.
02
It sells before it is built
Off-plan sales run on images. A photoreal set lets a developer market apartments, a hotel sell rooms and a retailer pitch a fit-out while the site is still a hole in the ground, months before anyone can walk the floor.
That gap between marketing and completion is where the return on visualization actually sits.
03
It settles the design argument early
Seeing a material at full size, in the right light, ends debates that drawings prolong. Changing a cladding colour in a model costs an afternoon. Changing it on site costs a great deal more.
We put an untextured clay view in front of you first, so the camera and the massing are agreed before anything expensive happens.
Architectural visualization services
One studio, the whole visual package.
Most projects need more than one kind of image. Everything below is produced in the same studio, from the same model, so the set agrees with itself.
Exterior rendering
The hero shot. Facades, massing and landscaping rendered in real light, with the street, the planting and the weather that the building will actually stand in. This is the image that goes on the hoarding and into the planning pack.
See exterior rendering
Interior rendering
Rooms built to your drawings and dressed with real materials, then lit until the image reads as a photograph. Used to sign a design off in one round and to sell apartments, hotel rooms and fit-outs off-plan.
See interior rendering
Aerial visualization
The view a drone cannot take yet. Aerials place a scheme in its real context: the neighbouring roofs, the coastline, the site boundary. That is what planning committees and investors ask about first.
See aerial visualization3D animation
A walkthrough or flythrough that moves through the finished building. Animation earns its cost where a still cannot go: the approach to an entrance, the sequence of rooms, the way a facade changes as you pass it.
See 3D animation
3D floor plans
Plans buyers can actually read. A furnished, textured, top-down or dollhouse plan communicates scale and flow in a way a black-and-white CAD drawing never does, which is why portals and brochures convert better with them.
See 3D floor plans
360° virtual tours
A panorama the viewer controls, on a phone or a headset. Tours keep a remote buyer in the space far longer than a carousel of stills, and they answer the question a still cannot: what is behind me?
See 360° virtual tours
BeforeAfterVirtual staging
An empty room furnished convincingly, at a fraction of the cost of physically styling it. Used on resale listings and on handover units that need to photograph as a home rather than as a shell.
See virtual staging
3D modelling & product
The geometry underneath everything else, and the same craft applied to a single object: furniture, fittings, joinery and building components rendered clean on white for a catalogue or a configurator.
See 3D modelling & product
What actually separates studios
Buyers cannot explain why one render works. They just believe it.
Every studio runs similar software. The difference is in three things that are decided by a person, not by a renderer.
Light does the selling
A building under flat midday sun looks like a model. The same building at low sun, with long shadows and warm light spilling out of it, looks like a place. We pick the hour for the building, not for convenience.
Materials, not presets
Real surfaces are uneven. Brick varies course to course, concrete stains under a sill, glass takes on the colour of whatever it faces. Preset materials render fast and read as CGI instantly.
Composed like a photograph
Where the camera stands, how high it is, what it leaves out. An architectural photographer would not shoot a facade from forty metres up; there is rarely a reason for a render to either.
Context told honestly
Neighbouring buildings shown as they are, planting at the size it will be on handover rather than in twenty years. Overstating the context is the fastest way to lose a committee's trust.
How a project runs
From drawings to final frame.
Brief
Brief and fixed quote
Upload CAD, PDF, Revit, SketchUp or a photo of a sketch. We build the brief from your files, so there is no questionnaire, and come back with a fixed per-project price and a delivery date within 30 minutes.
Days 1-3
Camera set in the scene
The building goes up as untextured geometry and the camera is placed in it. Standing point, lens and height are decided on a shell that costs almost nothing to move, rather than on a lit frame that costs a week.
Week 1
Clay view, before materials
Massing, neighbours and the hour of the day get agreed on a grey model. This is the cheapest moment in the project to change your mind, and the one where an objection is still an afternoon of work.
Delivery
The same tower, finished
4K as standard, larger crops for print on request, with full usage rights. The scene stays with us, so the next view of the same building, or the same building at another hour, is faster and cheaper than the first.
Clay model to final render
Drag to see what the visualization actually adds.
On the left is the clay view every project starts from: correct geometry, correct neighbours, and nothing else. No material, no weather, no hour of the day.
Everything right of the handle is the part a committee, an investor and a buyer respond to. Same model, same camera, same building. That gap is the whole discipline.
Real clay view and delivered frame from a residential tower in Tallinn.
Selected work
Buildings that did not exist yet.
Work across the Nordics, the Baltics, Europe, the UK, the US and Australia. Filter by type of work, by sector, by light, or by market.
Nothing matches those filters yet.
Who we work with
Built for the people who have to sell the drawing.
Architecture studios
Competition boards, planning packs and client presentations, art-directed to your house style rather than ours. One visual language across a whole submission, so six images read as one practice.
Read more
Real estate developers
Full marketing sets for off-plan sales: hero exteriors, apartment interiors, aerials, floor plans and tours from one model. The pre-sales asset that de-risks a scheme and speeds the raise.
Read more
Interior design firms
Schemes shown at full size with the specified finishes, so a client signs off on the room rather than on a mood board and three sample trays.
Read more
Property marketing
Portal-ready stills, staged interiors and 360 tours produced to a listing deadline rather than a studio one, for stock that has to photograph well before anyone can walk it.
Read more
Hotel and hospitality
Lobbies, suites, spas and restaurants rendered to the standard operators and investors expect, so a property can be marketed, booked and financed ahead of opening day.
Game studios and apps
Architectural-grade environments, assets and interiors built to real-world scale for real-time engines and AR, using the same modelling and lighting craft.
Read more
What you provide
How we plug into your workflow.
Built to slot into how architects, designers and developers already work. You send what you have, we handle the rest.
What we accept
DrawingsCAD (.dwg), PDF plans, elevations and sections, or a photograph of a hand sketch
3D and BIMSketchUp, Revit, ArchiCAD, AutoCAD, 3ds Max, worked natively rather than re-drawn
Design intentMaterial and finish schedules, RAL or NCS references, furniture references, brand guidelines, mood boards
The siteSite photographs, a survey, a street view link, or nothing at all if it is a greenfield plot
No perfect briefA plan and one reference is enough to quote. There is no questionnaire to fill in first
What you receive
Final frames4K as standard, up to 8K to 12K on request for hoardings and large-format print
Every cropHero, web, social and print ratios cut from one scene, with no re-ordering for formats
Preview and revisionsA clay view within days, then two revision rounds and refinement until you sign off
Optional extrasAn animation, a 360 panorama or a floor plan from the same scene, without rebuilding it
Full ownershipOf the delivered images, for marketing, planning, portals, press and your own portfolio
Not sure which discipline you need? Send the drawings and we will tell you what the scheme actually calls for, before quoting it.
Questions we get asked
Architectural visualization FAQs.
What is architectural visualization?
Architectural visualization is the craft of showing a building before it is built. The design is rebuilt as a 3D model from the architect's drawings, dressed with the real specified materials, lit to match a real time of day, and rendered at photographic quality. The output is a still image, an animation, a 360° panorama or a 3D floor plan. It is used to win planning approval, raise finance and sell units off-plan, which is why it is judged on whether people believe it, not on whether it looks impressive.
What is the difference between architectural visualization and architectural rendering?
In practice, none: the two are used interchangeably, and so is "archviz". If a distinction is drawn, rendering tends to mean the individual image and visualization the whole discipline, including animation, tours and the art direction around them. Nobody in the industry will misunderstand you either way.
How much does architectural visualization cost?
Per project, never per image. The drivers are the number of views, how complex the scene is, how ready your files are, the output resolution and how much art direction the images need. One hero view is the cheapest way to start; further angles of the same building cost significantly less, because the scene is already built. Send the drawings and you get a fixed number in 30 minutes rather than a range.
How long does it take?
A single view or a pair of images is about a week. Medium and large sets run two to three weeks. The clay stage (an untextured model used to agree the camera) lands within days of the brief, and the first photoreal preview follows shortly after, deliberately early, while the light, the materials and the styling can still be changed cheaply.
What software do you use?
3ds Max and Corona for most stills, with Unreal Engine where a project needs real-time or interactive output, and Blender in the pipeline where it suits. It is worth saying that the software matters far less than people expect: studios differ much more in styling, lighting and art direction than in which renderer they run, which is why matching a look you like is a briefing question rather than a technical one.
What files do you need to start?
Whatever you already have. CAD, PDF, SketchUp, Revit, ArchiCAD, 3ds Max, or a photograph of a hand sketch. You do not need a tidy file set to get a price, and you do not need to prepare anything for us first. If something essential is missing we tell you what it is when we quote, rather than discovering it halfway through.
Do you work with studios outside Estonia?
Yes, most of the work is remote. Projects run for Nordic and Baltic developers, UK and European architects, and clients in the US, Canada and Australia. Everything runs on files and video calls, so where the building is has no bearing on how the work is delivered or what it costs.
Who owns the images?
You do. Full usage rights to every delivered image are included: brochures, portals, hoardings, press, social and planning submissions, for as long as you like. There is no separate licence to buy later and no per-use fee. 4K is standard and larger crops for print are available on request.
Start a project
Send your drawings, get a fixed quote in 30 minutes.
Upload the plans, elevations or model you already have. No budget dropdown, no discovery call first.
We take a limited number of projects each month.