Site Photo Insertion

Inserts your 3D project into an eye-level photo of the real site: a concept photomontage of the finished building in its street. The site photo is the scene. Its camera, eye height, lens, horizon, light, sky, street, trees, cars and neighbouring buildings are kept, and the buildings on both sides of the plot stay entirely visible: if the project is wider than the gap, the new building is narrowed, never the neighbours cut. The 3D view is only a reference for the building: massing, number of floors, setbacks, facade rhythm, openings, balconies, roof shape and materials. Its camera, CG sky, ground, trees and lighting are left behind. The building is placed on the vacant plot and re-projected into the perspective of the photo, its floor heights scaled from the neighbours. Each cladding type, relief and colour of the model is rendered as a real material, and the glass reflects the actual street and sky. The ground is completed with paving, a curb and a strip of planting where a construction fence or gravel stood. Shadows follow the sun of the photo, low-poly CG trees become real planting, and the new facade gets the same exposure and contrast as its neighbours so it does not look pasted in. Useful for architects presenting an infill project to a client, a design team or neighbours, and for developers who want an early street-level image before commissioning a full visualisation.

An architect is designing a five-storey infill building on a gap site between two 19th-century apartment buildings. The client wants to see how it sits in the street before approving the facade direction. The architect photographs the plot from the opposite sidewalk, takes a viewport screenshot of the model from a similar angle, and runs both through Site Photo Insertion. The client sees the new facade between its real neighbours, at matching floor heights, in the light of that morning.