An exterior render on my price list starts at EUR 450 per image, an interior at EUR 250. People reasonably ask why one picture of a house costs almost twice one picture of a room. The short answer: an exterior camera sees far more, and almost everything it sees has to be built, planted or lit from scratch, because none of it is in your drawings. The longer answer is worth knowing before you order. It tells you where the money goes, and how to stop it going further.
What an interior camera sees, and what an exterior one sees
Stand in a living room and point a camera at the sofa. You see three walls, a floor, a ceiling, some furniture and a window, and the window shows a soft garden or a sky. Most of what's in frame is architecture I'm already modelling from the plan, plus furniture I can pull from a library and adjust to your spec.
Now walk outside and point the camera at the same house. You see the full facade, the roof, gutters, window reveals, the plinth, the driveway, a fence, the neighbour's hedge, a tree in the foreground, lawn, paving, a sky that has to agree with the sun, and usually a strip of street. None of that is on the floor plan.
That's the cost difference, in one paragraph.
On a typical two-storey house, the building itself takes me about as long as a furnished room. The site is what doubles it: terrain, planting, paving, retaining walls and enough surroundings to make the house look like it's standing somewhere real rather than floating on a grey plane.
Vegetation is the slow part
Grass, trees and shrubs are where exterior hours go. A convincing lawn in Blender is millions of individual blades scattered over the terrain, and one mature tree can run to a few hundred thousand polygons before the leaves are added. On a house with a front garden and two trees, the scene easily passes 20 million instances. It renders fine. It just isn't something you build in ten minutes, and the planting has to suit the region (Mediterranean pines in front of a Lithuanian farmhouse look wrong even to people who couldn't name either tree). Render time follows. A 4000 px interior in Cycles typically takes 20 to 40 minutes on my machine. A 4000 px exterior with full planting takes 40 to 90, and I'll usually render it at least twice: once for the preview, once after your comments.
Light: one sun, nowhere to hide
Inside, I control the light. I can tuck a soft fill behind the camera and nobody will ever know it's there. Outside there's one sun and one sky, and every shadow has to agree with them. Golden hour shots look great, and they're also the least forgiving: long shadows expose every small error in the terrain, and warm light shifts material colours, so I spend more time checking that the rendered cladding still matches the real sample board. Dusk shots, with the interior lights on and the sky still blue, are my favourite for selling a house. They're effectively two lighting setups in one image. You can see one in the modern cabin exterior study, where the warm windows carry most of the mood.
What's included at EUR 450, and what pushes it up
The published rate is a starting price for one exterior camera angle, built from complete drawings, with two consolidated revision rounds and a first preview targeted three business days after the brief is complete. "Complete" matters more than people expect. From my side it means:
- elevations and a roof plan, not only floor plans
- a site plan with the plot boundary, levels and existing trees
- a materials list with real product names or photos (render, timber, roof tiles, window frames)
- a marked camera position, or a street photo showing where a buyer would stand
What pushes the price above the starting rate is almost always the site. A steep plot with retaining walls, a pool, a house in a real street where the neighbours have to appear, or a garden designer who wants every species identified. Those I quote after seeing the files, and you get the number before I start.
Last spring I quoted a single-family house where the drawings were clean but the site plan was a phone photo of a pencil sketch. I priced it at the starting rate on the condition that I'd use generic, region-appropriate planting, and that was fine for the brochure. If the garden doesn't exist yet, a precise planting plan is fiction anyway.
Why the combined discount changes the maths
Most people don't really need one exterior. They need the house sold, and buyers want to see inside. The house launch set I publish is one exterior plus three interiors: EUR 450 plus 3 × EUR 250 makes EUR 1,200, and the 10% discount for three or more combined renders brings it to EUR 1,080.
That isn't generosity on my part. Once the house is modelled for the exterior, the interiors reuse the walls, windows and openings, and the views out of the windows are real because the garden already exists. Ordering the same images separately, months apart, costs you more and costs me more.
The common mistake: ordering the hero exterior first
Here's the counter-intuitive part. Developers often want the big street-facing exterior first and decide about the rest later. I'd do it the other way round, or at least order everything together. Why? The exterior is the most expensive single image and the one most likely to change, because facade materials are usually the last thing an architect fixes. Render it before the cladding is decided and you'll spend a revision round on brick colour.
Is that always true? No. If you need a planning or pre-sales image next week, order the exterior now and accept a revision later. But if the launch is two months away, wait for the materials list.
What I'd actually do with a house budget
For a single new-build house going on sale, I'd order one daytime exterior from the street, one rear garden view if the garden is a selling point, and two or three interiors: living space, kitchen, main bedroom. Order them together so the discount applies and the model is built once. Skip aerial views unless the plot itself is the product.
For a small development of identical units, one exterior of the whole row and one interior per unit type is usually plenty. Buyers understand that unit 4 looks like unit 2.
For a planning application, simpler is better.
A clear daytime view with accurate massing and honest materials beats a moody dusk shot that a planning officer might read as marketing, and it's quicker to revise if the scheme changes after the first round of comments.
You'll find current rates and the worked examples on the architectural rendering prices page, and finished houses on the exterior rendering services page. If you're planning interiors too, the interior rendering services page shows how those are set up. Have drawings ready? Send them for a non-binding quote and I'll tell you which views are actually worth paying for.