Exterior AI

Cladding and material is the biggest lever. Render, brick, stone, timber, metal panel, fibre cement, corten — name it in the prompt and the whole envelope is rebuilt in that material, with the joint pattern, texture and weathering that go with it. To test one surface at a time on an image that is already approved, rather than re-rendering the whole facade, material swap is the narrower tool.

Glazing, frames and roof follow along. Window frame colour, mullion weight, balustrade type, roof tile or standing seam, soffit and fascia all shift with the style you ask for. Because they change together, the result reads as one design decision rather than a collage of unrelated finishes.

Context and light do most of the persuading. The same building comes back under flat overcast light, at golden hour, or at dusk with the interiors lit, and the setting around it can be planted, paved, populated or emptied. Planting on the plot itself is better handled by landscape AI, and stray cars, bins or cables left in the original photo can be brushed out afterwards with inpainting.

What never changes is the building itself. Massing, floor count, roof line, window positions and the camera angle of your input all survive intact — the same rule that governs interior AI and sketch to render. If you want a different form rather than a different skin, that is a modelling decision, or a written description in Imagine, not an exterior restyle.

The most common input is not a CAD file, it is a phone photo of a building that already exists. Stand across the street, shoot the elevation you want to change, upload it. The facade AI reads the building out of the photo and gives you the same house in several material languages — which is exactly the conversation a renovation client wants to have.

That makes it a decision tool as much as a presentation tool. Homeowners choosing between white render and dark timber, contractors pricing two cladding options, planning consultants preparing an image for a committee pack: all of them are trying to settle one question, and seeing the answer on the actual building settles it faster than a sample board ever has.

Prompts matter more here than almost anywhere else, because you are describing a real building rather than inventing one. There is a tested exterior prompt library to copy from, and a material and finish prompt set for the stage where the geometry is agreed and only the skin is still in question.

The honest limit is obstruction. If a mature tree, a parked van or a neighbouring wall hides half the facade, the AI has to invent what sits behind it and the result drifts away from your building. Shoot when the view is as clear as you can get it, or accept that the obscured part of the render is a guess rather than a proposal.

A grey untextured viewport capture is one of the strongest inputs there is, because the geometry in it is unambiguous. Screenshot the view you want in SketchUp, Revit, 3ds Max, Rhino, ArchiCAD or Blender and upload it — or skip the screenshot entirely with the free SketchUp plugin, which sends the active view straight through without an export step.

Flat elevations work too, though they behave differently from a perspective. An elevation comes back as a rendered elevation: materials, shadow depth and reveal, but no new vanishing point. If what you want is a perspective view built out of line work, that is sketch to render, and a hand-drawn perspective is a much better input for it than an orthographic drawing.

Against a classic pipeline the trade is speed for control. Twenty to forty seconds here against twenty minutes to several hours in V-Ray or Lumion, with no scene setup, no material library and no light rig. What you give up is exact lighting simulation and the ability to dial one parameter at a time — which is why most studios run AI through the option-testing phase and a classic renderer for the final hero frame.

Frame the building so at least two faces are visible. A flat-on shot of a single elevation gives the model nothing to reason about in depth; a three-quarter view from across the street hands it the corner, the roof line and the ground plane in one image.

Even, diffuse light in the input beats dramatic light, however counterintuitive that sounds. Hard midday shadow bakes contrast into the source that the render then has to fight, and overcast is by far the most forgiving. You can ask for golden hour or dusk in the prompt regardless of when the photograph was actually taken.

Resolution matters less than framing — a normal phone photo is plenty — but output resolution starts to matter the moment a client is involved. Send the approved render through 4K upscaling before it goes onto a board, and turn the same frame into a short walkthrough clip if it is heading for a listing or a social feed.

Every account gives 100 credits on signup with no card. Free accounts always render at Ultra quality, which is 30 credits for an exterior — three renders a month. Paid plans start at $29/month and unlock Fast quality at 10 credits, so the same allowance goes considerably further, and one-time credit packs start at $15 if your work is project-shaped rather than continuous. Full breakdown on the pricing page.

Free output carries no commercial licence; any purchase adds one and covers client presentations, planning submissions and marketing. The limit worth knowing before you sign up: three renders a month is enough to judge whether the tool holds your building, not enough to produce a facade options set for a live project.