A single architectural render takes me about 3 business days from a complete brief to the first preview, and roughly a week to ten days to final images once two revision rounds are included. That's for one to four camera angles. The real answer depends less on rendering and more on two things: how complete the drawings are on day one, and how fast feedback comes back.
People expect the computer part to be slow. It isn't, usually.
The stages, with honest hours
Here's how a typical interior job splits, say a living room and kitchen from PDF plans with elevations. These are my own rough numbers from working this way, not a promise for every project.
| Stage | Hands-on time | Calendar time |
|---|---|---|
| Reading drawings, listing questions | 1 to 2 hours | same day |
| Modelling walls, openings, joinery | 4 to 10 hours | 1 to 2 days |
| Materials, furniture, lighting, cameras | 4 to 8 hours | 1 day |
| First preview renders | under 1 hour of my time | overnight |
| Two revision rounds | 2 to 6 hours | 3 to 6 days, mostly waiting |
| Final renders at 4000 px and delivery | 1 hour | overnight |
Look at the right-hand column. Most of the elapsed time is waiting, either for an answer about a ceiling height or for a round of comments, and very little of it is the machine rendering.
Modelling is where the days go
If you send me a Revit or SketchUp model that's reasonably clean, modelling might take two hours, because the walls and openings already exist and I'm mostly fixing scale and cleaning up geometry. From a flat PDF it's a different story. I'm drawing every wall from dimensions, guessing door heights if they're not marked, and building kitchen units from an elevation that may or may not match the plan.
Supplied 3D models are a mixed blessing, though. I've opened SketchUp files with the same sofa copied forty times on top of itself (nobody noticed, because it looked like one sofa), walls that don't meet, and windows modelled as flat rectangles with no frame depth. Cleaning that up can take as long as modelling from a PDF. I still prefer getting the model, because it settles questions about heights and openings that drawings sometimes leave open.
Exteriors take longer than interiors at this stage. A two-storey house needs the roof, facade materials, window reveals, terrain and planting, and the surroundings matter as much as the building. That's part of why exterior rendering services start at EUR 450 per view while an interior starts at EUR 250.
Last spring I got a set of plans for a small apartment that had no section and no ceiling heights anywhere. I modelled it at a standard 2.7 m, sent the preview, and the answer came back that the living room was actually 3.1 m with a lowered ceiling over the kitchen. Two days, gone, on a question I should have asked louder on day one. I now send my list of missing dimensions before I model anything.
How long the rendering itself takes
I render in Blender with Cycles on a GPU. A preview at around 1600 px with modest samples takes a few minutes per view, which is why I can tweak lighting and cameras quickly. A final interior at 4000 px wide usually takes between 40 minutes and a couple of hours per image, depending on how much glass, indirect light and fine detail like curtains or plants is in the shot. Exteriors with dense vegetation sit at the long end.
So a set of four final images renders overnight. Even if one fails and needs a re-run, that costs a morning, not a week.
Animations are another matter entirely, and I'd quote those separately.
Revisions: the stage you control
My prices include two consolidated revision rounds. The word "consolidated" is doing a lot of work there. It means one list of comments per round, agreed between everyone who has an opinion, sent in one message.
What slows a job down isn't the number of changes. It's comments arriving in pieces. A marked-up PDF from the architect on Monday, then a WhatsApp from the developer on Wednesday saying the floor should be lighter after all, then a third person who wasn't in the loop asking for a different sofa. Each fragment means re-opening the scene, re-lighting, re-rendering, and I can't start the next round cleanly until I know the list is complete.
Fewer, fuller rounds always win.
A common mistake: asking for previews of every small change. Do you need to see the new tile colour on its own before the lighting change is applied? Usually not. Batching three changes into one preview is faster for both of us.
What I'd actually do to get renders faster
If you're working to a launch date, three things move the timeline more than anything I can do on my side.
First, send the complete brief at the start: plans with dimensions, at least one section or ceiling heights, elevations of the kitchen and bathroom, and a materials list or mood board, even a rough one with photos from other projects. The 3-day first preview target only starts when that brief is complete, and I'd rather wait a day for it than build on guesses.
Second, decide who signs off. One person collecting comments from the team turns a revision round from a week into two days.
Third, order the views together. A house launch set of one exterior and three interiors comes out at EUR 1,080 with the 10% discount for three or more renders, and it's quicker per image than four separate jobs because the model, materials and lighting setup are shared. A three-view apartment set is EUR 675 on the same logic. You can see the full breakdown on the architectural rendering prices page.
When it takes longer than a week
Some jobs honestly take three weeks, and it's better to know that up front. I'd rather say that on the first call than promise a week and miss it. Large open-plan spaces with many views, custom furniture that has to be modelled from scratch, exteriors with a lot of terrain and planting, or projects where the design is still changing while I render. If the architect is still moving walls, every revision round is partly a new model.
My own rule is simple: if a design will change by more than a few elements after the first preview, I'd suggest waiting a week and starting from the final drawings. It costs you less and you get the images sooner, which sounds backwards until you've lived through a job where the kitchen layout changed twice.
If you want to see what a finished set looks like before you plan your timeline, the portfolio has interiors, exteriors and cabins done exactly this way, and the interior rendering services page explains what's included. Send me your drawings through the quote form and I'll come back with a non-binding price and a realistic date.