3D rendering vs collage: seeing your Batumi apartment before renovation

3D rendering vs collage: what each one shows

A collage is a sheet that brings together the actual items in the project: the sofa, light fittings, tiles, fabrics, paint. Each item usually comes with a product code and a shop, so the collage also works as a shopping list. Sometimes the items are laid out over the room plan to show what goes where.

A 3D rendering is built from the measured survey of your apartment. Furniture goes into the model at its real size, the chosen materials go on the walls, and the lighting is set from the windows and the light fittings in the project. The result is a view of the room after the renovation from several viewpoints.

There is also an in-between format: a rough model without materials, used only to check volumes and clearances. It is ready sooner than a full render and comes in handy when the discussion is about where the furniture goes and colour hasn't come up yet.

Scale, light and where materials meet

The weak point of a collage is proportion. On the sheet, the sofa and the wardrobe look in scale with each other. In the room, the sofa may block half of the balcony door and the wardrobe door may hit the windowsill, and 3D shows this at once, because the furniture stands in the model at its real size.

The same goes for light. A collage shows the light fittings but not the room in the evening: where the shadows fall, whether there is enough light over the table, whether the bedside lamp shines in your eyes. In 3D the lighting is set up as in the project, and you see both a daytime and an evening view.

The third question is the joins. On a collage, tiles, wood and paint sit side by side as neat squares. In 3D you can see how the splashback meets the kitchen fronts, where the tiles change to the living room floor and whether a threshold is needed there.

Time, revisions and cost

A collage is quicker to put together and costs less. Swapping an item on it is simple: take one picture out and put another in. That makes a collage convenient at an early stage, while you are still choosing between two sofas and three wall colours.

3D needs a model and a render, and every round of revisions takes time. We make the renders after the layout and the mood board are approved, so that the model doesn't have to be rebuilt because of a change of style. It helps to settle open questions at the collage stage, where a change costs almost no time.

The cost of 3D depends on the number of rooms and views, on how much furniture has to be modelled from scratch, and on whether evening views are needed. A collage has almost none of these costs, because the items are taken from catalogues as they are.

If you are far away or the apartment is for rental

For an owner who lives in another country, 3D takes the place of a walk through the future apartment. You can look at a room from several angles, show it to your family and discuss it on a call. That doesn't work with a collage: imagining a room from a set of items takes experience.

When several people make the decision, 3D saves calls, because everyone reads the image the same way. With a collage, everyone fills in the picture in their own head, and an argument about the colour of the sofa sometimes comes up only after delivery.

For short-term rental, 3D has one more use. The camera in the model can be placed where the photographer will stand, and the main listing photo can be checked before the renovation: whether the sea is visible, whether a wardrobe blocks the window, whether the whole bed fits in the frame. If the shot doesn't work, moving furniture in the model is easier than in a finished apartment.

How to combine a collage and 3D

You don't have to pick just one. We make 3D for the rooms where a mistake is expensive and everything is on view: the kitchen-living room, the bathroom, the bedroom in a rental. We show the hallway, walk-in wardrobe, study and a child's room with ready-made furniture as collages.

The usual order is a mood board, then collages room by room, then 3D of the main rooms. With each step fewer options remain, and the render, which takes the most time, is made when most decisions have already been taken.

Neither a collage nor 3D replaces the working drawings. A picture won't tell the crew the height of a socket or the tile layout, so the renders go into the project together with the sheets where all of this is written down.