3D renders for townhouse developments

A townhouse development needs renders for every home a buyer might reserve, including the ones behind the street frontage. For most sites that means the street view, the rear homes and shared driveway, some private outdoor space, and the kitchen, living room, bedroom and bathroom.

The rear homes are the shots most often left out. Heatherbank in Glen Innes has two townhouses facing the street and four in a row behind them, so the Heatherbank renders take a buyer down the shared path, past the parking bays and into a private back garden with its deck.

Off-plan townhouse buyers use renders to pick a home, and often to compare one development with several similar terraces nearby. Until the townhouses are built, the renders are the only version of them anyone can look at.

More consented townhouses means more terraces going to market in the same suburbs. Buyers usually meet the renders on a listing or a social post first, then on the site board and in the brochure, so one set has to work at phone size and at print size. The Rogers Street bathroom was framed as a tall portrait image for that reason: it fills a phone screen and shows the shower and vanity at full height.

Video does a different job. A long terrace is hard to take in from one still, so Ludlow Terrace had a cinematic film that moves along the row and into the homes, and Lemon Street had a walkthrough alongside its renders and drone imagery. See our cinematic walkthrough video service and the guide on how developers use renders to hit presales.

A townhouse render set is built from the drawings, the specification and a clear idea of which views matter. Use this checklist before you brief a studio:

• Architectural plans and elevations for each townhouse type
• The colours and finishes schedule, with product names for roofing, cladding and joinery
• Kitchen designer drawings, so the joinery and benchtops are right
• Landscape details for fences, hedges, paving and planting
• An interior moodboard or styling references
• A list of the views you want, or a request for the studio to choose the strongest angles

The Ludlow Terrace brief listed ten suggested views, from day and twilight street elevations to a detail shot, and asked Render Works to pick the best angles. Our guide to what to provide for a 3D render project covers each file in more detail.

Townhouse renders are accurate when every visible finish comes from the specification schedule rather than a generic material library. Buyers of similar-looking homes notice small differences, and they will compare the finished townhouse with the render that sold it.

• Rogers Street: Colorsteel FlaxPod roofing and joinery, AAC panels painted Resene Black White, and vertical weatherboards in Resene Element.
• Tussock Lane: darker grey carpet in the bedrooms, lighter grey tiles in the bathrooms and timber floors in the kitchen.
• Lemon Street: white front doors, an exposed-aggregate concrete driveway and natural timber retaining.

Repetition is the other problem to solve. Ludlow Terrace is seven three-storey townhouses with light brick below and black vertical cladding above. The exterior angles were chosen so the row reads as a clear rhythm rather than one facade seven times: a front-on view of the whole row, the brick corner at the driveway entry, the view along the garages and the street corner with its batten fence. All of this sits within our 3D architectural render service.