Rendair review and guide to AI architectural rendering by Shay Klaassen

Shay Klaassen covers AI tools for the architecture industry. This video is a feature-by-feature guide to Rendair, followed by his own review. He uses a mix of inputs from real projects and past work: a simple elevation found online, a Rhino sketch view, a Zaha Hadid-style aquatic center model, an ArchiCAD screenshot and an Unreal Engine render. Watch it if you want a balanced look at what works well and what is still hit or miss.

What you'll see

1. A tour of the website and dashboard, including the community gallery, video tutorials and Chat.
2. Text to Render with a painting style and a structured prompt: subject first, then keywords.
3. Elevation to Render on a basic elevation, with and without a reference image of a timber-framed house.
4. A quick-fix pass that selects the roof and walls one at a time and regenerates them, close to how Select and Modify works today. He uses it to correct a sloped roof the first pass read as flat.
5. Sketch to Render on a Rhino sketch view, using negative prompts and coastal and snowy night settings.
6. Remove Objects to take out a stray chimney artifact, using the magic wand after the image is analyzed.
7. 3D Model to Render on three different inputs, with the ArchiCAD screenshot giving the best result.
8. Image to Render on an existing Unreal Engine render to switch it to rain, sunset and snow. Today, Change Weather covers this directly.
9. Chat to add people to the rainy render.
10. Upscale on a low-quality office interior, then Virtual Staging on that image with preset keywords.
11. Image to Video from the rainy and snowy renders.

Takeaways

• He was impressed by how closely Elevation to Render and Sketch to Render stayed within the input, and found the images held together when zoomed in.
• For 3D Model to Render, he advises feeding in a detailed view with background and context. A transparent PNG with no surroundings lost its perspective.
• He called the rainy version of his Unreal render one of the best environment changes he has seen from an AI tool. The sunset version was less convincing.
• He sees the strongest use in changing existing renders, such as time of day or cladding, rather than replacing a professional visualizer. For university work and early ideas, he finds sketch rendering very useful.
• His honest caveat: some tools are hit or miss, with occasional artifacts and results that miss the brief. Video was somewhat usable but needed small fixes.

Try it yourself

Take a finished render into Change Weather or Change Time of Day for alternative versions, and use Virtual Staging to test interior options on a screenshot from your model.

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