How long since you sat down and added up what realistic rendering costs your business?
Here's some of what you might be spending:
❌ Subscriptions to Enscape, Lumion or V-Ray at $700-$5,000 a year depending on how many seats you pay for
❌ Outsourced renders at $500-$2,000 per project (plus days or weeks of turnaround time)
❌ Hours of staff time working inside rendering engines (a junior designer spending 10 hours on a render is not free!!)
When you add it all up you're likely spending somewhere between $5,000 and $50,000 a year on realistic rendering alone.
Some of you skip rendering altogether and you're paying for it as well, just in a way that's harder to see:
➡️ Weaker proposals that prospects are comparing with competitors who are rendering
➡️ Lower perceived value to clients
➡️ Slower client approvals because they can't picture what you're proposing
➡️ Lack of confidence in your own pricing
These costs show up in lost clients and lost revenue.
What's changed in the past few months
AI rendering quality has made a massive jump in the past few months, which is why I've started talking about it more. The gap between AI renders and traditional renders is closing fast and this is a real commercial opportunity for your business.
The cost of realistic rendering has basically collapsed. The tools to do this now cost about $20 a month compared to the thousands you're probably spending right now.
What hasn't collapsed is your design and the SketchUp model underneath it. But you can now take your SketchUp work into an AI workflow and control:
🟢 Interior and exterior realism
🟢 Lighting and time of day
🟢 Pool water, landscaping, planting and sky
🟢 Materials and finishes
🟢 Furniture and styling
The AI render may not quite match the $800 outsourced one but it's about 90% of the way there, costs almost nothing and takes about 2 minutes!
More importantly, your clients can't tell the difference between the two and will be just as "wowed" by the 2 minute AI render as they would be by the one you outsourced for hundreds of dollars and waited a week to get back.
Here are some examples (all done with AI):
Yes, I've changed my mind on this :)
For the past 7 years I've taught SketchUp to over 15,000 students. Over the years the most requested thing people have asked me for is a rendering course so they can take their SketchUp skills further.
For 7 years I've been saying no to creating this because I didn't want to make another software course and honestly didn't think realistic rendering was necessary for most A&D professionals. You could win great work and look professional without it.
But with the recent advances in AI rendering capability I've changed my mind.
In the next 6-12 months rendering won't be a "nice to have" anymore, it'll be what everyone does. The two things that used to make it hard (the cost and the time) have basically vanished. So if you're not rendering you'll be the practice that stands out for the wrong reasons.
Everything I've ever made at TLDC has one goal in mind, I want you to make more money and look professional doing it. Realistic rendering now sits in that camp, which is the reason I've finally built the program people have been asking me for.
You still need to be the designer
There are "AI experts" in the A&D industry right now telling you to skip the design process entirely and let AI do everything. I'm definitely not one of those people.
Your ability to design in SketchUp matters just as much as it ever has because AI has no taste or design judgement. You still need to design the project, model it and make every decision yourself. What goes into AI determines what comes out and your design expertise is the only reason the render looks any good in the first place!
So I'm not telling you to hand AI your entire design process, I'm telling you to let it do one step (SketchUp model to realistic render), which is one of the slowest and most expensive parts of your workflow right now.
Here's the maths that makes this a no brainer
My program, AI Rendering for SketchUp is a few hundred dollars.
You make that back the first time you skip one outsourced render. Everything after that is money you stop spending e.g. the subscriptions you can cancel, the offshore modelling you stop paying for, the hundreds of hours your team gets back. A few hundred dollars, once, against the $5,000 to $50,000 a year rendering is costing you now.
In the program you implement proven workflows that take SketchUp work to client facing renders in a few minutes. I've put 40+ hours into testing them so they're stable. If you charge out at $150/hr that's another $6,000 of your time saved by not having to play around and test workflows for yourself.
Don't let AI sit with one person in your practice
A lot of you have one or two "AI curious" people on your team. Don't let AI live just with them. Your goal should be an entire practice that is thinking AI first, with everyone using it daily across as many design and business workflows as possible.
Rendering is the easiest place to start because the ROI is immediate and it's also really fun! :)
In the program I show you how to implement this as a team, which opens up the conversation about AI in your practice in a fun and engaging way.
