3D rendering in Mumbai from a studio you can visit in Prabhadevi

Land in Mumbai is scarce, so much of the new housing comes from redevelopment. An old building or a housing society is taken down and a taller tower goes up on the same plot. The plots are tight, the flats are compact, and the amenities sit on a podium above the parking or on the roof. A render has to show all of that honestly: the tower between its neighbours, the real width of the road, the size of a bedroom with a bed in it.

The former mill lands of central Mumbai, around Lower Parel, Worli and our own neighbourhood of Prabhadevi, now hold many of the city's tall residential and office towers. The western and central suburbs add society redevelopments and larger projects on old industrial plots. Interior designers here work mostly on flats, where storage is planned to the centimetre.

A 3D view of a small room can mislead. A very wide lens makes a compact 2BHK look like a hall, and the buyer feels the difference on the first site visit. We set the camera at eye level, with a lens close to what a person sees, and we model furniture at its real size. If a double bed leaves a narrow gap to the wardrobe, the view shows that gap.

For developers, this keeps the brochure close to the flat that is handed over. For interior designers, it means the client approves the room they will actually get.

Tell us where each image will appear before we start, because the size and the crop follow from it. In Mumbai that usually means a brochure, a hoarding near the site, the sales office wall, a property portal and the pictures forwarded on WhatsApp by channel partners, the brokers who sell on a developer's behalf.

Advertisements for a registered project carry its MahaRERA registration details. We leave clear space in the composition for that line and for your logo. Final sizes are agreed in the quote.

Stills are quoted per view. What a view costs follows from three things: how much of the flat or the building has to be built in 3D, how closely the materials and furniture must match a specification, and how many rounds of changes the quote allows for. Once a flat is modelled, further views of it need less work than the first, so a set of views of one flat comes to less per view than one view each of several flats.

Some buyers ask for a price per sq ft. That unit suits construction and interior execution. A render is priced by the number of views and the detail in them, so we quote per view and state the count in the quotation. Our guide to 3D rendering cost in India explains each unit and what a quotation should list.

Prabhadevi is in central Mumbai, between Dadar and Worli. A first meeting at the studio is useful when the project is large, when several people need to agree on the views, or when you want to bring material samples so that we match the stone, the veneer and the fabric.

After that, most of the work runs on shared review links, where you mark comments on each draft. Clients who prefer not to travel across the city do the whole project over video calls.