Architectural visualisation
Herzele, Belgium
Renders, films and live 3D models of buildings, interiors and gardens. Scroll, and go in.
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BOHAUS is a studio in Herzele, East Flanders, Belgium. It makes renders (also called artist impressions), films and live 3D models of buildings, interiors and gardens for architects, garden and landscape architects, interior designers and developers, and small AI workflows for design studios. The tour on this page goes from a single render into the workflows that made it. Here it is as text.
Model: The clay pass settles shape and light. Materials, planting and water go in, and the finished render becomes a film, generated from the same camera.
Life: From the delivered render, the same corner with people in it: an AI enhanced render.
A living room in Koksijde, delivered empty, the way a render is delivered. A little later, life found its way in.
A house on the coast, rendered for its architect: a living room shaped by daylight and full-height glass, with nothing in it but the furniture. The architecture, the materials and the light do the talking. A room, waiting for someone.
Three interiors were drawn up for this room. The earlier scheme, the one with the green sofa and the warmer accents, gives way to the one that was delivered. Different furniture, different details, and still the same camera and the same afternoon light.
Once the render was finished, the question changed. Not what the room looks like, but what it might feel like to be there. So people were brought in: into the picture rather than into the model, the way a photographer waits for someone to cross the frame.
Sunday, a little after nine. The sun has reached the cushions, a cup of coffee is going cold on the table, and nobody is in a hurry to get up.
The architecture comes first. The render sets the room, the materials, the light and the camera, and the design stays the architect’s. AI adds a layer on top of that: someone in the room, a moment starting to happen. Every picture made that way is called an AI enhanced render, because how an image was made is part of what it is.
Motion: From the inhabited still to a short film, generated and cut in the studio.
The still begins to breathe. The room stays the same, but the moment does not: a page turns, the light shifts, and suddenly there is time inside the frame.
It starts from the inhabited living room: a few seconds of film, grown from the finished picture. Nothing is rendered again and the camera goes nowhere. The room is the one you already know; only the moment changes.
Then the idea grew into something longer: a morning in the apartment, from a quiet moment on the sofa to the first coffee at the kitchen island.
Nothing much happens. A page turns, the curtain breathes, the light moves a hair to the left. The kind of moment you would barely notice in real life, and still you stay to watch.
Making an image move is the easy part. Making the movement feel as if it belongs there is the craft. The motion is generated from the picture, then chosen, trimmed and cut by hand, and looked at frame by frame before it leaves the studio. The architecture stays the architecture throughout.
It is not a film shoot and not a rendered animation. It is another way to tell a space, with the image as the starting point instead of the end.
Night: Vasenare, by Jacxsens · Immax Vastgoed Brugge. One model, one camera, three moments: the day, the golden hour, the night. The lamps come on as the light goes.
Half past seven in October. The car door shuts, the gravel gives, and the lamps along the path are already on, as if someone knew you were coming.
At the heart of Vasenare lies the garden between the buildings: winding paths, planting, a pond, places to sit. It is what sells the project, so the job was to show more than buildings: the atmosphere of the place, and how it changes as the day goes by. One model and one camera, rendered three times.
By day the architecture is clear and the garden takes centre stage. At the golden hour, warmer light softens the facades and gives the planting depth. After dark, the windows and the path lights make it another place altogether. The buildings have not changed, and neither has the camera. Only the light, and the feeling it leaves behind.
Around the architecture are the moments that make a place feel like home. A conversation on a balcony. Someone taking the long way through the garden. Starting from the renders, we looked for those quieter details in a few AI enhanced renders: not to change the design, but to bring a little more life into the spaces around it.
The evening and the night are not filters laid over the day. Each one is lit in the same model, lamp by lamp, which is why the three match to the pixel and can follow each other like hours. Where the lamps go is the designer’s call; making the evening believable is the part we enjoy most.
Upscale: Our own model, run locally and tuned for architecture: when a picture has to go bigger than it was made for, it adds back the detail that would get lost.
A facade that existed only at web size. Now it can go on a wall.
A picture can look sharp on a screen and still go soft on a wall: the grain of the timber, the rough edge of a brick, the light catching a joint. So the enlargement runs on a model on our own machine, tuned by us for architecture: brick, timber, glass, planting. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.
AI can add detail that was never there, so every result is checked against the original before it is used. Sharper is not the same as truer.
Up close, the door has a grain you can almost feel under your thumb, and the brick keeps the small chips of being made by hand.
Build: The Koksijde permit plans, read line by line and stacked at their levels.
A project you can open in a browser: the permit plans of a house in Koksijde, read line by line and stacked into a building that stands up, turns, and comes alive after dark.
Plans hold an extraordinary amount of information, but you need to speak their language to read them. We wanted to make that easier. From the four permit drawings the floors rise, the walls take shape, and how the spaces connect is visible at a glance.
The building is drawn live on the page, the way this whole site is, and turns under a finger or a mouse. There is nothing to install and no file to download: a link opens it on the screen of whoever has to understand the project, the client, a buyer, the team around the table.
Four sheets of paper, and then, quite suddenly, a house with a basement under it and sky above. The moment you stop reading a plan and start walking through it.
Then the light goes, and the same model becomes a lighting study. The lamps, placed by us, show the structure, the windows warm, and a car comes down the street, onto the lift and backs into its box. The car is on the plans; its way in is staged. Move the pointer and the view follows.
Once the building is understood, another question comes up: what would life around it feel like? A walk through the dunes, someone arriving home, the last warmth of the evening sun. The same building, finished, in a few AI enhanced renders and generated films.
How lines become walls, slabs, a stair and a lift is a small machine we built for ourselves. It is a light reading of the plans, made to show structure, proportion and how the spaces connect. It does not replace the drawings, and it does not pretend to be a render. It is the quickest honest way to understand a set of plans, and to show them to someone who cannot read them.
Maquette: A garden of our own, as a maquette in ink and watercolour: set the season, the hour, the drawing and the growth on the card.
What if a garden design could show not only how it looks on the day it is planted, but how it grows over the next ten years? To find out, we designed a garden of sixteen by thirty-six metres in the studio, with planting that will take ten years to become what the drawing promises, and turned its planting plan into a living model.
Nothing here is generic greenery. The maquette is built from the planting plan, plant by plant: 691 of them, each standing where the plan puts it and drawn as its own species. Twenty-four plants and six trees, each described once in our plant library: its height and spread, its leaf colour for every month of the year, the way it grows, and when and in what colour it flowers.
Spring does not arrive everywhere at once, and here it does not either. The garden runs month by month, and every plant keeps its own calendar. The white narcissus Thalia opens at the end of March, the near-black tulip Queen of Night a month later, then the purple heads of the alliums in May and the blue spikes of salvia Mainacht. Geranium Rozanne carries on from June into November. In late summer the white autumn anemones take over and the grasses come into plume: miscanthus Red Wine holds its plumes until December, and the pennisetum keeps its seed heads standing through the winter.
The trees leaf out, colour and drop on their own dates. The beech hedge turns copper in autumn and keeps its rust-brown leaves all winter; the hydrangeas stand as bare twigs from November to April; the flower meadow blooms from May to July. Move the season on the card and the whole garden follows, plant by plant.
A garden is never finished on the day it is planted. Trees take years to find their crowns, hedges close, borders fill in, each at its own pace. The maquette shows it at three moments: as planted, after three years and after ten. The botanical facts come from the design book or a reliable source, never from a mood picture.
Turn it to November and the beech goes copper; turn it to evening and the windows warm. A garden you can hold in one hand, ten years before it grows up.
Behind the watercolour is an engine we built for it. It draws live, like a hand drawing, and everything in it is at real size, in metres. Each tree stands at the height and crown the plan gives it; each plant at the height and spread its species really reaches.
Growing up follows the way a garden actually grows. The trees go in at a little under half their final size and fill out over ten years. The perennials reach their full size in four or five. A new hedge closes in about five, and a hedge that was already there stays as it is. So the garden after three years and after ten is not a guess dressed up: it is the plan, grown at the pace of the plants in it, as close to the real thing as a drawing gets.
On this page it rests as stills. Live, with your email on the card, it turns and lets you in.
Garden story: A garden by Tuinarchitectuur De Winne, told for its owners: five renders from the street to the living room, each view marked on the planting plan.
A garden is rarely seen from one spot. You arrive from the street, follow the path to the house, discover the planting on the way and end up looking back at it from inside. So the design became five views along that walk: front, path, back, terrace, inside. Each one is pinned on the planting plan, so the owners always know where they stand and what they are looking at.
The gate clicks shut behind you. Gravel, then grass, then the smell of the borders, then the kitchen window with the kettle on. Five views, one walk home.
For the owners it is not a PDF but a small web application: the planting plan on one side, the views on the other, and a pin that moves as you walk. A simple interaction, and it makes the design easier to understand. It opens from a link on a phone, a tablet or a laptop, and they can pass it on to whoever is helping them decide.
The same walk can become a virtual tour in 360 degrees. From each point on the plan you see the garden all around you: stand at the gate, turn, and look back at the house. The pins on the plan become the places you step to.
The views are renders, composed from the design with care for the materials, the planting and the light. The side path became a few seconds of generated film. The rest is editing: which five views, in which order, tell the garden best.
The year: The entrance in autumn, winter and spring, as one generated film: the garden in the season of the sale.
The entrance of a front garden by Tuinarchitectuur De Winne, rendered in summer. Then autumn, winter and spring, imagined from that one picture.
Frost on the grasses in January, the first green in March. The garden in the months nobody photographs, which is most of them.
Every garden has more than one face. This one started as a single finished render of a front garden in summer: grasses, a path, the door. From it came the same garden in the other three seasons, seen from the same spot, and a short film that drifts through them.
In summer the garden feels open and inviting. Autumn brings warmth and texture. Winter shows the structure under the planting, and spring suggests everything starting again.
The seasons are AI enhanced renders of the summer render, so the garden can be shown in the season the sale is in: autumn colour for an October launch, frost for a winter brochure, the first green for spring. The same goes for a mood, an hour, a few people walking up the path. The garden stays the one that was designed.
Library: 1,936 of the studio’s renders, in the order they were made.
Index: The same renders, placed by CLIP: facades to the left, interiors to the right, apartment blocks below. No tag typed by hand.
Benjamin Bogaert: I’m Benjamin Bogaert, the person behind BOHAUS, an independent studio in Belgium. You work directly with me, from the first conversation to the final details.
Contact: Tell me what you want to show, and by when. Send plans, a model or a reference straight away.
BOHAUS, Perrestraat 70A, 9550 Herzele, Belgium. hallo@bohaus.be, +32 470 81 16 87. Privacy.