What is a 3D elevation and the other words you will hear

In an architect's drawings, an elevation is a flat drawing of one face of a building: the front, the back or a side. It shows heights, windows and doors, with no depth. A 3D elevation is that face made into a realistic picture, with the real materials, colours and shadows, the compound wall, the gate, and often a car and some planting in front.

Homeowners use it to decide how the house will look from the road before the facade, the outer face of the building, is built. It is commonly asked for as a 3D front elevation, for a bungalow, a row house or a commercial building, sometimes with a night view as well. We render elevations from an architect's drawings. We do not design the facade. See 3D elevation rendering.

A 3D view is any realistic still image made from a 3D model. A 3D view of a house can be the outside or any room inside. A 3D elevation is one kind of 3D view: the outside, seen face on or from a corner. Render is the studio's word for a 3D view. A perspective view is a 3D view drawn the way the eye sees, with distant things smaller.

A 3D floor plan is the plan of a flat or house seen from above, with the walls given height and the floors, furniture and fittings shown. It helps a buyer who finds a line drawing hard to read see where the bed, the sofa and the kitchen counter go.

A 3D cut section slices the building open, across a floor or down through all the floors, and removes the part in front so the inside is visible. It shows how rooms stack and how high the ceilings are. A 3D isometric view shows a whole flat or building from a raised corner angle, drawn without perspective, so lengths stay in proportion and far things do not look smaller.

These three are diagrams as much as pictures. We do not offer floor-plan or cut-section drawings as a service. Your architect prepares those. From the same design we make the realistic views described in the rest of this guide.

A bird's eye view, also typed as bird eye view, is a picture taken from high above and at an angle, as if from a drone. It shows the whole building with its roof, the plot, the garden, the parking and the road. Aerial view means the same.

Developers use an aerial view to show a township or a villa community in one image: where the buildings stand, where the clubhouse and the open spaces are, and how the roads run. For a single house it shows how the building sits on the plot. We make aerial views as part of 3D exterior rendering. Our renders of Villa Mehr in Alibaug include one.

A 3D walkthrough is a short film of the design. A camera moves through the 3D model of the house or project along a planned route: in through the gate, through the lobby or the front door, room by room, out to the balcony. It is also written walk through, and called a walkthrough video or a walkthrough animation. A fly-through is the same idea with the camera in the air.

A still view shows a single moment from a single spot. A walkthrough shows how rooms connect and what you see as you move from each to the next. Developers use it as the launch film for a project. See walkthrough animation.

A 360° view is a single image that covers everything around one standing point. On a phone or a computer you drag it to look left, right, up and down. On a phone you can also tilt the phone to look around.

Several 360° views linked together make a virtual tour. You click the floor to move from one viewpoint to the next, room to room. A tour can be photographed in a finished space, or made entirely from the 3D model for a home that is not built yet. We make both kinds.

BHK stands for bedroom, hall, kitchen. A 2BHK has two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen. A 3BHK has three bedrooms. When a developer or a designer asks for 2BHK views, or a 3D view of a 3BHK flat, they mean a set of 3D interior views covering that layout: the living room, the kitchen, each bedroom and often a bathroom.

Developers order a set for each flat type in a project, for the brochure and the website. Homeowners get them through an interior designer, to see their own flat before work starts. See 3D interior rendering.

All of them start from a design that already exists. If you are a homeowner, the design comes from your architect or interior designer, and we make the pictures from it. If the design has not been made yet, that is the first step, and it is their work.

To ask for a quote, send the drawings and say which of these you need and how many. This is what we make.

• 3D views, also called renders, of interiors and exteriors
• 3D elevations, rendered from an architect's drawings
• Bird's eye and aerial views
• Walkthrough films
• 360° tours, photographed or rendered
• Interactive and VR walkthroughs, for developers