3D Exterior Animation

When does an animation outperform stills?

Animations win when the project narrative depends on movement — approach to the building, materials catching changing light, public realm activation through the day, scale shifts from human level to drone altitude.

Stills sell a moment. Animations sell a story. For €5M+ launch campaigns, social-first marketing, investor pitch decks and competition videos, the story almost always pays back the €2,400.

For straightforward sales of a single house or a small development, stills do the job — you don't need a flythrough to sell a townhouse. The dividing line is roughly: project value above €5M, or marketing budget that includes paid social, an animation pays back. Below that, stills.

We've shipped 89 animations since 2014. The average client orders one animation as the launch lead, plus three to five stills off the same model for static social assets. Bundling animation + stills off one model saves about 25% on the still pricing.

How does the animation pricing scale?

€2,400 covers a 30-second 4K cinematic. 60 seconds is €3,800. 90 seconds is €5,100. Vertical 9:16 social cut is included if booked at brief stage.

The price scales with rendered seconds, not minutes. Each second of 4K animation needs 24 to 30 frames rendered, each frame the equivalent of a static render. So 30 seconds of animation is roughly 750 stills' worth of compute time.

What that buys: the cinematic itself, music licence, sound design, motion graphics, two revision rounds, master file plus four delivery formats (16:9 4K H.264, 16:9 ProRes 422, 9:16 vertical for social, square 1:1 cut). All licences are perpetual.

Add-ons that show up regularly: live-action plate compositing (insert your CGI building into real drone footage, +€800), animated CGI people walking (+€450 for up to 12), seasonal sequence — summer to winter dissolve (+€650), VO recording (€350 per language).

Do you do animations for unbuilt projects?

Yes — that's most of our animation work. Unbuilt residential, mixed-use launches, masterplan reveals. The 3D model can be built from CAD, sketches, or even verbal brief plus references.

For pure concept stage we charge a 25% concept surcharge because we'll do more lighting and material exploration before the photoreal pass. That moves a 30-second animation from €2,400 to €3,000.

Once the project is past concept stage and into developed-design or planning, standard rates apply. The closer the brief is to construction-grade documentation, the cheaper the animation runs.