AI rendering for architecture: full Rendair test in Spanish by arqMANES

arqMANES is an architecture teacher whose channel covers AutoCAD, Revit, SketchUp and now AI tools. In this long video he and a student sidekick put Rendair through a full set of tests, mostly on free SketchUp Warehouse models and images found online. It's playful in tone but practical. You see the same model rendered again and again with different settings, which makes it one of the clearest demonstrations of what creativity and image fidelity actually do.

What you'll see

1. Text to Render for a tower in La Paz, Bolivia. He uses ChatGPT to write a comma-separated keyword prompt under the 600-character limit, starting at low creativity, then raising it.
2. 3D Model to Render on a bare SketchUp house exported as an image, prompted as a beach house at sunset in wood and concrete. He mixes Spanish and English keywords.
3. The same model rerun several ways: very high image fidelity and low creativity to keep two small windows, a reference image added for mood, then high creativity with low fidelity for freer versions.
4. Changing the brief entirely: an aged rustic wooden cabin with a new reference, then a brick house in a residential street on a rainy morning.
5. Inserting a car cutout with the older insert and modify tool, scaling and flipping it, then letting the tool blend in reflections and shadows.
6. 3D Model to Render on a plain living room model, in realistic, more architectural and collage styles.
7. Sketch to Render on a small, low-resolution sketch of a meeting room, with and without a reference image.
8. Remove Objects to clear stray elements the sketch lines had caused, using a brush.
9. Elevation to Render on a CAD facade of a modern infill building, with and without curtain-wall references.
10. Upscale on small renders found online, to 4x and then to 4K.
11. Image to Video with a slow-motion preset.

Takeaways

• He shows that image fidelity and creativity are the main controls: high fidelity with low creativity kept the model almost exactly, while the reverse gave freer but stranger results.
• He advises against setting fidelity to 100 percent and used about 95 percent when he needed small details kept.
• Some results had flaws: a roof that looked too thin, odd wooden floor strips in an office, and a strange sky caused by a watermarked reference image. Cleaner references and lower creativity fixed most of them.
• He believes AI will take over much of traditional rendering because of the time, hardware and expertise it saves. He admits it can't yet keep materials consistent across different camera views.
• He expects traditional rendering to survive for clients who want exact detail and can pay for it.

Try it yourself

Take a screenshot from your own SketchUp model into 3D Model to Render. Generate a few sets while you move image fidelity and creativity in opposite directions. Then use Remove Objects and Upscale on the version you keep.

The video is in Spanish.

Recorded with an earlier version of Rendair, so some screens and app names look different today.