Pricing
How Much Does Architectural CGI Cost in the UK? (2026 Guide)
From single stills to full animation packages — a clear pricing guide for exterior CGI, interior renders, walkthroughs, and virtual tours in the UK market.
Architectural CGI in the UK typically costs between £250 and £12,000+, depending on the type of deliverable and its complexity. A single interior still starts from around £300, while a single exterior render begins at roughly £450. Walkthrough animations are priced from £2,500 per minute of finished HD footage. A 360° virtual tour with 4–6 scenes starts from £800. For mid-size residential developments requiring a suite of marketing visuals — perhaps three exterior views, five interior stills, and a short animation — you should budget between £2,500 and £8,000. Price is influenced by the complexity of the geometry and materials involved, the number of views commissioned, the quality of the source files you provide, the turnaround time required, and the experience level of the studio you engage.
There is a figure that rarely appears on any CGI invoice, yet it silently inflates the cost of almost every project that goes wrong: the price of reshoots. In traditional architectural photography, returning to site when the weather fails, the landscaping is incomplete, or the contractor has left a skip in shot can easily cost £800–£2,000 in crew and travel. With CGI, none of those variables exist. The sun angle, the season, the planting maturity, the parked cars — all of it is controlled, adjustable, and repeatable at the click of a mouse. When you frame CGI costs against the full cost of getting visual content right on a development, the numbers look very different. This guide breaks down what you will realistically pay at every level of the UK market in 2026, so you can plan your budget with confidence from the outset.
In This Article
- What Affects the Cost of Architectural CGI?
- Exterior CGI Rendering: Typical UK Prices (2026)
- Interior Rendering Costs
- Walkthrough Animation: What You'll Pay
- 360° Virtual Tour Pricing
- Landscape and Garden CGI Costs
- How to Get an Accurate CGI Quote
What Affects the Cost of Architectural CGI?
The single biggest driver of CGI cost is complexity — both the complexity of what is being modelled and the complexity of the brief used to describe it. A simple rendered box with two material finishes and a flat roofline is a very different proposition from a mixed-tenure residential scheme with brickwork, glazed curtain walling, timber cladding, a landscaped podium deck, and cars in the foreground. Studios price on the basis of how long a scene will take to build, light, and render, so geometry-heavy projects with intricate detailing will always command a premium.
The quality of the files you provide has a direct and significant impact on your quote. A client submitting fully developed Revit or ArchiCAD files with material schedules and site survey data allows a studio to begin modelling immediately — that efficiency is reflected in the price. A self-builder providing hand sketches and a mood board from Pinterest will require the studio to interpret, query, and model from scratch, which adds hours of billable time to every image. The more complete and precise your source files, the lower your final invoice is likely to be.
Rush turnaround attracts a premium of between 20 and 40 per cent at most reputable UK studios. If you need renders within 48–72 hours rather than the standard 7–14 day production window, expect to pay accordingly. Finally, studio experience matters: a boutique studio with a strong portfolio in high-end residential will typically charge more than a general-purpose visualisation house, but the output quality, the level of creative direction, and the accuracy of materials will usually justify the difference — particularly for marketing-critical projects where the imagery is the first thing a buyer or investor sees.
Exterior CGI Rendering: Typical UK Prices (2026)
Exterior rendering is the most common CGI deliverable in the UK property sector, used across planning applications, investor decks, hoarding graphics, and digital marketing campaigns. Prices vary considerably depending on the number of views commissioned, the level of contextual detail required, and whether the brief calls for standard daytime lighting or more atmospheric conditions such as dusk or twilight.
Twilight renders — showing a building at dusk with interior lighting glowing through glazed elevations and carefully placed landscape uplighting — consistently perform well in property marketing. They cost more than daytime equivalents because the lighting rig is substantially more complex to build and balance convincingly, but for a premium residential development or a commercial scheme making a planning submission, the additional spend is generally worth it.
Package pricing becomes highly cost-effective once you move beyond a single image. Commissioning three to five exterior views together allows the studio to amortise the scene setup cost — building the 3D model, placing the context environment, calibrating materials — across multiple outputs. That is why a five-view package at £3,500 often represents better value than five individual images at £700 each. For larger commercial schemes requiring multiple angles, aerial views, and lighting variations, budget from £5,000 upwards, with bespoke quotes available on application.
Interior Rendering Costs
Interior CGI is the discipline with perhaps the widest spread between a basic and a premium result. At the lower end of the market, a simple bedroom or living room render with flat-pack furniture and generic finishes can be produced quickly and inexpensively. At the upper end, a show-home interior scene for a luxury development — with bespoke joinery, specified furniture from named brands, textured fabrics, and precise natural lighting calibrated to the building’s orientation — requires many more hours of modelling and lighting work, and is priced accordingly.
Material complexity is the dominant cost factor in interior CGI. A white-painted room with engineered oak flooring and off-the-shelf furniture takes a fraction of the time to build and light compared with a kitchen scene featuring marble worktops, handleless cabinetry in a custom RAL finish, a pendant light cluster, and specified appliances. If your interior schedule includes multiple distinctive material finishes — which is typically the case for a developer offering a choice of specification tiers — each variation adds to the overall budget.
Commercial interiors, such as office fit-outs, hotel lobbies, or retail environments, often sit at the higher end of the price range because the furniture is unusual, the ceiling systems are complex, and the lighting design is intricate. A full apartment suite commission — covering living room, kitchen, main bedroom, second bedroom, and bathroom for a typical one or two-bedroom new-build — is generally the most efficient way to produce a comprehensive interior package, as the scene environment is built once and the camera is repositioned for each room.
Walkthrough Animation: What You'll Pay
Walkthrough animation is a step change in both production complexity and budget compared with still imagery. The same 3D scene that takes a studio two or three days to render as a still image may require two to three weeks of additional work to animate convincingly — because every camera movement must be fluid, every transition purposeful, and every frame of the sequence must hold up to scrutiny at full playback speed.
In 2026, UK studios typically price HD walkthrough animation at £2,500–£6,000 per minute of finished footage, rising to £3,500–£8,000 per minute for 4K deliverables. Many studios also quote on a day-rate basis, with senior visualisers billing at £800–£1,800 per day. A typical two-minute residential walkthrough — covering an exterior approach, a ground-floor living area, a kitchen, and a master bedroom suite — will usually land between £5,000 and £10,000 all-in for HD delivery, depending on the studio and the level of finish required.
Post-production costs account for a significant share of animation budgets and are sometimes quoted separately. Colour grading, licensed music, voice-over narration, lower-third captions, and final export in multiple formats for web, social, and presentation use all add time and cost. A basic flythrough with no narration and stock music may sit comfortably at the lower end of the pricing range. A cinematic production with a custom score, professional voice-over, 4K colour grade, and deliverables for a developer sales suite will be priced at the upper end — but it is the kind of asset that can anchor an entire marketing campaign for a multi-phase scheme.
360° Virtual Tour Pricing
CGI-based 360° virtual tours have become one of the most effective tools available to UK property developers selling off-plan. Unlike photographic virtual tours, which require a physical property to exist before they can be produced, CGI tours are created directly from 3D models — meaning buyers can immerse themselves in an apartment that has not yet broken ground. This makes them particularly valuable for first-phase launches, where the ability to generate reservations before completion is commercially critical.
Pricing for CGI virtual tours is typically structured on a per-scene basis. Expect to pay £150–£350 per scene for a tour built from an existing 3D model, with discounts available when multiple scenes share the same environment. A six-to-eight scene tour of a typical two-bedroom apartment — covering the entrance hall, living space, kitchen, master bedroom, second bedroom, and bathroom — will usually cost between £1,200 and £2,500, depending on the level of interior detail and the complexity of the hotspot navigation.
Hosting and platform costs vary significantly between studios. Some include 12 months of hosting in the project fee, delivering the tour via a branded web link or embeddable iframe. Others charge ongoing hosting at £15–£50 per month after the initial period. When comparing quotes, clarify whether hosting, interactive hotspot additions, mobile optimisation, and future scene updates are included in the initial fee or billed separately — these variables can materially affect the total cost of ownership over a typical sales campaign.
Landscape and Garden CGI Costs
Landscape and garden CGI is often underestimated as a budget line, yet it is one of the most impactful categories of architectural visualisation for planning submissions and public consultation materials. A well-executed landscape render — showing a residential scheme in summer maturity, with planting beds fully established, a considered material palette for hard landscaping, and realistic dappled light through a tree canopy — can be decisive in securing planning consent and in communicating the quality of a proposed environment to prospective buyers.
Single landscape views are typically priced at £400–£850, depending on the density of planting, the complexity of the hard landscaping design, and whether the site context needs to be modelled from mapping data. Seasonal variation sets — producing the same view in spring, summer, and autumn to demonstrate how a scheme will look across the year — cost from £900–£1,800 for three renders, making use of the shared scene setup to reduce the per-image cost.
For larger public realm and masterplan projects, where a studio must visualise a street-level perspective across a mixed-use development, a public square, or a new community park, budgets typically run from £1,500 to £4,000 per view. These commissions are frequently submitted to local planning authorities, which means accuracy in scale, planting species, and material specification is paramount — as is the ability to produce additional views or amendments if the planning officer requests them during the determination process.
How to Get an Accurate CGI Quote
The quality of the quote you receive from a CGI studio is directly proportional to the quality of the information you provide when you ask for it. Studios that quote blind — based on a project name and a vague sense of scale — will either pad their estimate with contingency or strip it back to win the work and add costs later through revision charges. Neither outcome serves you well.
Before approaching any studio, prepare the following: architectural drawings or CAD files at the most developed stage available (Revit, ArchiCAD, SketchUp, or PDF elevations and floor plans), a note of the site location (for sun angle and context), a material schedule or at least a reference board indicating the intended finishes, and a clear statement of how the imagery will be used — planning, investor marketing, sales brochure, or social media. The more precisely you can articulate the intended output, the more accurately the studio can price it.
Reputable UK studios will typically respond to a well-structured brief within 24–48 hours with a detailed quote. When comparing proposals, pay close attention to what is included in the revision allowance — the industry standard is two to three rounds of amendments per image, but some studios include only one, or charge per revision request above the baseline. A studio that quotes attractively but bills for every small change can end up costing significantly more than a higher headline quote that includes generous revision rounds. At 3D Vistas, we provide free, detailed quotes within 24 hours and include two full revision rounds as standard on every project — with the third available at no charge for most residential briefs.
CGI has fundamentally changed the way UK property is marketed, planned, and sold. The ability to show a building as it will look on completion — with the right light, the right planting, and the right interior specification — before a single brick has been laid is a commercial advantage that compounds through every stage of a development. Costs are highly variable, and the right budget depends entirely on what you need to achieve. Whether you are a sole architect commissioning a single planning render or a national housebuilder equipping a new phase launch with a full visual suite, the best starting point is an accurate, tailored quote. Get in touch with the 3D Vistas team and we will have a detailed proposal with you within one working day.
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