AI sketch to render workflow for architects by The Architecture Grind

The Architecture Grind speaks to architecture students and young designers. In this video he uses Rendair across the early design of a school with two volumes and a double-height atrium. His point is that AI should speed up idea generation, not replace your own design thinking, and he shows where he steps away from the tool to sketch and model by hand. It is worth watching for the way he moves between AI and his own work at each stage.

What you'll see

1. Text to Render for early inspiration, starting from a very simple prompt and refining it over several rounds, with the keyword helper for styles and materials.
2. Hand sketches based on the strongest ideas from those studies.
3. Sketch to Render to test materials on his sketch, such as light and blended brick with blue metal panels around the atrium. When results were weak, he cleaned up the sketch and tried again.
4. Building the 3D model himself, then 3D Model to Render in two modes: low image strength and high creativity for early form-finding, or high image strength and medium to low creativity to keep the massing and add materials.
5. Reference images taken from brick and metal panel manufacturers to steer materials, plus more detailed prompts to raise accuracy and realism.
6. Select and Modify on the atrium cladding to test different brick and panel colors while keeping the glass.
7. Inserting cut-out people and trees with background removal, so they render into realistic elements.
8. Drawing a new building into a Google Earth street view screenshot, a site-context sketch step close to today's Annotate Image.
9. A style pass with reference images, similar to today's Render Variation, then Upscale to 4K.

Takeaways

• He sees the main value as failing faster. A weak idea costs a few minutes in AI instead of an hour of sketching and modeling.
• He recommends detailed prompts. A specific prompt gave him noticeably more accurate and realistic images than a simple one.
• Image strength and creativity are the settings he adjusts most, depending on whether he is still finding the form or finishing a render.
• He was blunt that AI did a poor job of generating 3D models at the time, so he modeled the building himself.
• Not every result was usable, and some colors did not come out as he wanted. He fixed those with targeted edits rather than starting over.

Try it yourself

Use Sketch to Render to test materials on an early concept, 3D Model to Render with a manufacturer reference image for the final view, and Select and Modify for color studies.

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