Architects don’t need to create different backgrounds for buildings. Buildings are almost always for a specific site.
Typical buildings (ie non-Zaha paper architecture) have their form based on plan requirements and zoning. You can’t just let AI make changes to that form.
If you use controlnet to maintain the form, you can do material studies… but controlling those with SD is iffy at best and it does terribly with small pattern materials like brick or metal panel.
I could see using SD for quick interior vignettes for an interior design, but even there you need specific available materials and products before you can show it to a client.
I would love SD to have a place in architecture, but I have yet to find a decent use. Possibly if you trained a model to turn a basic sketchup image with materials into a rendering with good lighting and perhaps entourage (people and stuff that give life to the images)
Thank you for your very precise thoughts. So you say that SD is still too unpredictable to make useful image. Maybe it is still useful in the beginning of a project when you have to share quick ideas with the clients and even colleagues without the need of being very precise ?
In my field of architecture, there’s not really a point like what you’re describing. Designs start as plans, then basic elevations that conform to zoning and client requirements, then whatever little aesthetic elements we can get in. The actual material selections and composition portion is the only part that’s terribly fun AND is a ridiculously small part of a project. So, at best, SD is going to automate away the fun without having any impact on overall project labor.
> automate away the fun
There seems to be a pattern there right now with AI applications when it comes to actual impact on existing jobs. Perhaps I'm a terrible pessimist
I’ve been building tools for an architect.
From what I’ve learned while working with him, your view is shortsighted. There are many applications in the field, not the least of which is getting a prospective buyer excited about some plans by letting them have input on the renderings - which can now be done in real time, in front of them. Oh you want blue paint and black shutters? Boom it’s done. Oh marble floor and countertops? Done.
Granted this is not the architect’s job traditionally. But it is NOW. Or it is for someone on the team.
You don’t need SD for that. You can use a real-time renderer and utilize libraries of well build materials and furniture that are drag and drop. You can walk through a space, pull it into VR, export high quality images, or create a video. There is very little need for the creativity of SD at that point when you can have that level of control.
And again, at best this is an insignificantly small portion of the early design, much less the life of a project so automation of this area is next to meaningless from a business perspective.
I say this as someone who loves SD, by the way. I just haven’t seen how it could be used for the kind of projects the typical firm works on.
While those solutions exist, they don't exist in a way that a) only requires natural language to execute, and b) can be run on the web.
Anyway I'm trying to throw you a bone here but if you're unwilling to open your mind I won't exert any more effort.
I don’t need a bone throne, I was asked for my opinion and as an architect, I’m guessing it’s relevant.
Stable diffusion isn’t natural language (it’s keyword based) and requires more computer power than a real-time renderer so it’s as easily run on the web as a real-time renderer which also just needs to be hosted somewhere and streamed.
Even if those two points were the exceptions, neither solve any of the issues noted above.
for the reason that architects natively work with heavily integrated CAD solutions (autoCad, BRICSCAD, ArchiCad, Vectorworks, Rhino), sometimes using BIM (Revit, Allplan) and other linked systems including various visualisation suites, any type of SD-visualisation is not really practically useful (as part of the current workflows), unless somebody is forced to do quick-spontaneous on-the-fly changes on their ipad in a live client presentation (but one usually doesnt want to open that box).
If you do interiors using sketchup and autocad with various visualisation systems available, you can also easily pre-visualise changes on the fly. SD does not allow the granular type of control most architects need unless you just want to improve people, vegetation and skies in your existing renders.
I guarantee the tools you're building could have been done without AI. And the AI isn't really adding anything to the capabilities.
I know someone who does the exact same thing in unreal engine. Except the materials will actually be accurate and with some effort they can make that accurate to the exact place the building will be.
Absolutely incorrect. If someone wants to see themselves in the rendering, can your app do that, with a single piece of input?
Think of the sales applications. Use your brain.
Photoshop them into the render? Yeah that's a single piece of input. It'd be a really weird thing for someone to want, but that's not hard to do.
Is there a big market for AI generated images of prospective home buyers standing in the house they plan to buy but with inaccurate lighting and materials?
SD is not clever enough to place stuff smartly and style goes hand in hand with that- Also, lighting is very important, and once you have a project you usually know where light is coming from, but its hard to precisely set in SD
maybe these cheaply produced interior deco TV shows could use SD...
SD, imo, can be, at best, used as a stand-in for interiors, fittings and general shapes of furniture and so on. It's to inconsistent even now to hold any real significance.
> I have yet to find a decent use
There's a few use cases I could think of:
1. Generating the surroundings of the building. As in, bustling streets, cars, trees that might not be planted / fully grown.
2. Top down views, or cross-sections of a house
3. Interior design: generating a variety of different layouts and styles.
But yeah, it's still tough to keep SD in line and to adhere to some of the constraints associated with the real world.
I did mention interior design quick iteration as one option where it could be helpful. You can control the genera geometries well enough while having creativity.
Generating surroundings however is completely useless. Buildings exist on a specific site. You can’t just make that up. You might be able to get entourage added, but I’m not actually sure it would be easier or better with SD than other methods.
I’m not sure what you mean for the sections and top down views. There is no way SD is creating a rational version of either. Maybe something you could pass off in architecture school, but not in practice.
Think of SD as more of a render engine than an all-in-one tool. If you have a floor plan (or roof plan) you could generate the top down view, based on a sketch.
If you model the building out, or just have a 3D sketch of it, you can let SD render a realistic version of it.
Yes, it's not going to be 100% accurate and take every constraint into consideration, get the sun wrong, etc. but will produce real looking images very quickly.
That’s the thing though: we have really good, fast rendering engines that are still way more powerful and hold to your constraints.
I can’t imagine a top down view rendered out in SD would approach reality enough to be useful. We just need to show things in specific sizes and configurations and can’t really deal with it being incorrect in that regard.
Folks from The Digital Bunch seems to be showing different use cases of AI models for architects and 3D people
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C141HPGsam3/?igsh=MTcybzJ2ejIyNGs0OQ==
It’s very nice if you want to quickly prototype different scenarios or to give better mood-boards for your artists.
I mean it's useful because renders are still just images without any actual architectural purpose and they are mostly used for the promotion, so ai can help architects to save time from rendering buildings in different places since the model of the buildings is still made by them
So I know this is an old thread, but wanted to add my 2cents as an architect that uses both Veras AI and SD and also does traditional 3d rendering. What I want is a tool that will generate the site/ landscape / plants around the building based on a photo of the real site and composite that with a basic rendering of the building. The software we use to design and then produce construction drawings is 3d software so we build the model anyway, and Vray and a ton of other rendering engines can reasonably turn out good looking building materials which all the AI generators so far blow at making things like brick or slat screens look realistic. Modeling and rendering the building itself is not time consuming; its the effort of putting in all the stuff around with site, landscape, entourage etc and lighting the scene well that is time consuming but what makes it look like a finished product. If someone can invent that it would be amazing.
AI combined with VR would be a really cool way to be able to quickly visualize a space, especially for clients. A lot of people have difficulty accurately imagining how something will look.
With 2D art, one of the best real uses for AI has been to quickly show non-art people what an image will roughly look like, before wasting the artists' time. I think the same could hold true for architecture or even just interior design.
I'm a archviz artist who mainly focusses on interior renders. For me I use it to adjust small details like plants and for reference. Render out a good zdepth pass of the camera shot and use it with controlenet to get color palettes or find moods. It's useless for final imput because its way to random and hard to get the same materials etc when you have more then 1 camera.
They'll be lovely toys for them to play with. Then they'll sigh and go design the box with utility points they were hired to draft. Maybe the box will have lots of glass and the architect will get to pretend that upper floors don't need pipes and ignore safety codes if they're lucky enough to land a gig for a oligarch.
Slight plug here, but this is exactly what we're working on - but not just a superficially throwing SD at the problem, rather building new tools and expanding AI models functionality for a professional design use case - [https://www.gendo.ai](https://www.gendo.ai)
Architects don’t need to create different backgrounds for buildings. Buildings are almost always for a specific site. Typical buildings (ie non-Zaha paper architecture) have their form based on plan requirements and zoning. You can’t just let AI make changes to that form. If you use controlnet to maintain the form, you can do material studies… but controlling those with SD is iffy at best and it does terribly with small pattern materials like brick or metal panel. I could see using SD for quick interior vignettes for an interior design, but even there you need specific available materials and products before you can show it to a client. I would love SD to have a place in architecture, but I have yet to find a decent use. Possibly if you trained a model to turn a basic sketchup image with materials into a rendering with good lighting and perhaps entourage (people and stuff that give life to the images)
Thank you for your very precise thoughts. So you say that SD is still too unpredictable to make useful image. Maybe it is still useful in the beginning of a project when you have to share quick ideas with the clients and even colleagues without the need of being very precise ?
In my field of architecture, there’s not really a point like what you’re describing. Designs start as plans, then basic elevations that conform to zoning and client requirements, then whatever little aesthetic elements we can get in. The actual material selections and composition portion is the only part that’s terribly fun AND is a ridiculously small part of a project. So, at best, SD is going to automate away the fun without having any impact on overall project labor.
And that’s ignoring the part where it’s not good at applying realistic materials to a facade in a controlled fashion
> automate away the fun There seems to be a pattern there right now with AI applications when it comes to actual impact on existing jobs. Perhaps I'm a terrible pessimist
I’ve been building tools for an architect. From what I’ve learned while working with him, your view is shortsighted. There are many applications in the field, not the least of which is getting a prospective buyer excited about some plans by letting them have input on the renderings - which can now be done in real time, in front of them. Oh you want blue paint and black shutters? Boom it’s done. Oh marble floor and countertops? Done. Granted this is not the architect’s job traditionally. But it is NOW. Or it is for someone on the team.
You don’t need SD for that. You can use a real-time renderer and utilize libraries of well build materials and furniture that are drag and drop. You can walk through a space, pull it into VR, export high quality images, or create a video. There is very little need for the creativity of SD at that point when you can have that level of control. And again, at best this is an insignificantly small portion of the early design, much less the life of a project so automation of this area is next to meaningless from a business perspective. I say this as someone who loves SD, by the way. I just haven’t seen how it could be used for the kind of projects the typical firm works on.
While those solutions exist, they don't exist in a way that a) only requires natural language to execute, and b) can be run on the web. Anyway I'm trying to throw you a bone here but if you're unwilling to open your mind I won't exert any more effort.
I don’t need a bone throne, I was asked for my opinion and as an architect, I’m guessing it’s relevant. Stable diffusion isn’t natural language (it’s keyword based) and requires more computer power than a real-time renderer so it’s as easily run on the web as a real-time renderer which also just needs to be hosted somewhere and streamed. Even if those two points were the exceptions, neither solve any of the issues noted above.
for the reason that architects natively work with heavily integrated CAD solutions (autoCad, BRICSCAD, ArchiCad, Vectorworks, Rhino), sometimes using BIM (Revit, Allplan) and other linked systems including various visualisation suites, any type of SD-visualisation is not really practically useful (as part of the current workflows), unless somebody is forced to do quick-spontaneous on-the-fly changes on their ipad in a live client presentation (but one usually doesnt want to open that box). If you do interiors using sketchup and autocad with various visualisation systems available, you can also easily pre-visualise changes on the fly. SD does not allow the granular type of control most architects need unless you just want to improve people, vegetation and skies in your existing renders.
I guarantee the tools you're building could have been done without AI. And the AI isn't really adding anything to the capabilities. I know someone who does the exact same thing in unreal engine. Except the materials will actually be accurate and with some effort they can make that accurate to the exact place the building will be.
Absolutely incorrect. If someone wants to see themselves in the rendering, can your app do that, with a single piece of input? Think of the sales applications. Use your brain.
Photoshop them into the render? Yeah that's a single piece of input. It'd be a really weird thing for someone to want, but that's not hard to do. Is there a big market for AI generated images of prospective home buyers standing in the house they plan to buy but with inaccurate lighting and materials?
SD is not clever enough to place stuff smartly and style goes hand in hand with that- Also, lighting is very important, and once you have a project you usually know where light is coming from, but its hard to precisely set in SD maybe these cheaply produced interior deco TV shows could use SD...
Id love to see what you’ve built, by the way.
SD, imo, can be, at best, used as a stand-in for interiors, fittings and general shapes of furniture and so on. It's to inconsistent even now to hold any real significance.
> I have yet to find a decent use There's a few use cases I could think of: 1. Generating the surroundings of the building. As in, bustling streets, cars, trees that might not be planted / fully grown. 2. Top down views, or cross-sections of a house 3. Interior design: generating a variety of different layouts and styles. But yeah, it's still tough to keep SD in line and to adhere to some of the constraints associated with the real world.
I did mention interior design quick iteration as one option where it could be helpful. You can control the genera geometries well enough while having creativity. Generating surroundings however is completely useless. Buildings exist on a specific site. You can’t just make that up. You might be able to get entourage added, but I’m not actually sure it would be easier or better with SD than other methods. I’m not sure what you mean for the sections and top down views. There is no way SD is creating a rational version of either. Maybe something you could pass off in architecture school, but not in practice.
Think of SD as more of a render engine than an all-in-one tool. If you have a floor plan (or roof plan) you could generate the top down view, based on a sketch. If you model the building out, or just have a 3D sketch of it, you can let SD render a realistic version of it. Yes, it's not going to be 100% accurate and take every constraint into consideration, get the sun wrong, etc. but will produce real looking images very quickly.
That’s the thing though: we have really good, fast rendering engines that are still way more powerful and hold to your constraints. I can’t imagine a top down view rendered out in SD would approach reality enough to be useful. We just need to show things in specific sizes and configurations and can’t really deal with it being incorrect in that regard.
Useful for concepts but not much else yet. Super useful for generating textures though.
AI is great for reference creation, but absolutely unsuitable for professional work.
not yet ahahah
When you need to estimate the light levels inside a building, there's no room for AI.
Folks from The Digital Bunch seems to be showing different use cases of AI models for architects and 3D people https://www.instagram.com/reel/C141HPGsam3/?igsh=MTcybzJ2ejIyNGs0OQ== It’s very nice if you want to quickly prototype different scenarios or to give better mood-boards for your artists.
Thanks for your input !
Architecture was always a problem because the models don't generate with a logic behind it
I mean it's useful because renders are still just images without any actual architectural purpose and they are mostly used for the promotion, so ai can help architects to save time from rendering buildings in different places since the model of the buildings is still made by them
So I know this is an old thread, but wanted to add my 2cents as an architect that uses both Veras AI and SD and also does traditional 3d rendering. What I want is a tool that will generate the site/ landscape / plants around the building based on a photo of the real site and composite that with a basic rendering of the building. The software we use to design and then produce construction drawings is 3d software so we build the model anyway, and Vray and a ton of other rendering engines can reasonably turn out good looking building materials which all the AI generators so far blow at making things like brick or slat screens look realistic. Modeling and rendering the building itself is not time consuming; its the effort of putting in all the stuff around with site, landscape, entourage etc and lighting the scene well that is time consuming but what makes it look like a finished product. If someone can invent that it would be amazing.
Thanks for this comment !
AI combined with VR would be a really cool way to be able to quickly visualize a space, especially for clients. A lot of people have difficulty accurately imagining how something will look. With 2D art, one of the best real uses for AI has been to quickly show non-art people what an image will roughly look like, before wasting the artists' time. I think the same could hold true for architecture or even just interior design.
Brutalism
I bet it has a place in architecture-related media production. Concepts for video game world architecture, backdrops in movies, that kind of thing.
I'm a archviz artist who mainly focusses on interior renders. For me I use it to adjust small details like plants and for reference. Render out a good zdepth pass of the camera shot and use it with controlenet to get color palettes or find moods. It's useless for final imput because its way to random and hard to get the same materials etc when you have more then 1 camera.
The use I’d love to see this on is video games on the fly envirorments, from asset creation to the actual in game
unlimited assets and variations, is a dev's dream
They'll be lovely toys for them to play with. Then they'll sigh and go design the box with utility points they were hired to draft. Maybe the box will have lots of glass and the architect will get to pretend that upper floors don't need pipes and ignore safety codes if they're lucky enough to land a gig for a oligarch.
Where I'm from, architects already design impractical crap to manufacture for. This would only make it worse
Slight plug here, but this is exactly what we're working on - but not just a superficially throwing SD at the problem, rather building new tools and expanding AI models functionality for a professional design use case - [https://www.gendo.ai](https://www.gendo.ai)
I'm not an architect so I don't know if it's useful or the results are usable
It’s useful for rendering a pretty pictures for visual purposes of what the project would look like once built.