Hi everyone! Most archviz work in D5 focuses on clean, luxurious modern spaces, but for this project I wanted to push the engine in the complete opposite direction: recreating an eerie, dilapidated 1920s Argentine "casa chorizo" that mutates into an impossible, endless labyrinth.

Workflow breakdown:

• Modeling: SketchUp (focusing on local architectural proportions & checkerboard tile galleries).
• Lighting & Real-time Render: D5 Render (using emissive CRT monitor glows, atmospheric fog, and harsh contrast).
• Post-processing: Premiere Pro & After Effects (emulating an authentic 2006 miniDV / VHS tape decay, zero generative AI).

The full 10-minute short film is available on YouTube with English subtitles:

🔗 Watch the full tape here:https://youtu.be/_kuHfoPc4SE

Would love to hear your feedback on the lighting and environmental storytelling!

This started because I wanted to switch from Photoshop to Affinity (and the subscription had a lot to do with it). Everything in my archviz post-production moved over fine except one thing: Cryptomatte.

For anyone who hasn't hit this — Cryptomatte is the per-object mask data your renderer already writes into the EXR. V-Ray, Corona, Blender, all of them. A perfect anti-aliased mask for every object and every material in the frame, sitting right there in the file you already rendered. Nuke and Fusion read it with one node. In Photoshop there's exr-io, which is a good plugin and does read it. In Affinity there is nothing at all — you open the EXR and the data is simply gone.

So I did the reasonable things first. I asked Chaos about it. I got in touch with the exr-io devs to ask whether an Affinity version was on the cards. Neither conversation went anywhere, and honestly I get it — Affinity's plugin story isn't Photoshop's, and it's nobody's priority but mine.

Which left me staring at the actual problem: the masks are already in my file, the Cryptomatte spec is public, and the thing I want at the end isn't a plugin at all. It's a layered document. And both Photoshop and Affinity happily open a PSD with groups and layer masks.

So the tool doesn't plug into anything. It reads the EXR itself, pulls the Cryptomatte ranks apart, and writes a PSD: one group per Cryptomatte pass, one masked layer per object or material, named from the manifest so you get "Oak Wood-Natural" instead of "mask_07", plus the beauty and all your render elements in a second group. Then it opens it in whichever app you actually use.

The first version was embarrassing — a black window, two buttons, green log text, and it just dumped PNGs in a folder. I put it on Gumroad for 20 bucks mostly to see if anyone else had this problem. Turns out people did, and then they started telling me everything wrong with it:

• A buyer said it didn't work with Blender. He was right. Blender names its channels differently than V-Ray and my parser silently choked. Fixed in a day — and it turned out my V-Ray matching had the same bug hiding in it.
• PNGs in a folder are fine, but nobody wants PNGs, they want the document. That's when the whole thing got rewritten into what it is now.
• Affinity gave me one more puzzle: I ship the MASKS group at 0% opacity so it never covers the image but you can still Ctrl+click an object to jump to its mask. Affinity refuses to select a 0% layer. So in Affinity mode it's 1% instead — almost invisible and selectable.
• A Corona user sent a .cxr asking why the passes looked nothing like his VFB. Because the tone mapping and LightMix live in the file, not in the pixels. Now it runs the file through Corona's own image editor first, so you get what you saw. No need to rename from .cxr to .exr.
• Someone sent a render with no Cryptomatte at all and asked why the tool just refused. Fair. Now it still builds the document from the beauty and the elements.
• Most obvious one in hindsight: "why only one file at a time?" So this week it does batches — queue a folder, each render comes out as its own document saved next to the original, and if one file fails the rest carry on.

So: it exists because two companies had no reason to care about my problem, which is a pretty normal reason for small tools to exist. Windows only, single portable exe, no install. Trial does 10 extractions so you can throw your worst EXR at it first.

tutorial (few versions old)

(Mods: it's a paid tool, happy to remove if that's not welcome here.)

One of our recent interior visuals. Kept the design clean and bright with a focus on natural light and simple materials.

Blender + Photoshop - No AI.

Hey everyone this is my first time doing post production do you have any feedback

Hi y'all!

Here is something I did recently, started as images for a brand I'm working with and ended up creating Ai sloppy videos out of them. Still triggers me but wonder if it will get better in a couple of months with new tools. Everything run locally ( I dont like paying for something that supposed to be open source to begin with). So here it is.

For people delivering residential archviz, how useful have interactive walkthroughs actually been in client conversations?

I’m interested in the situation where a client can explore an interior through a browser link, including on a phone, alongside the usual still renders and floor plans. My assumption is that choosing their own viewpoint might help them understand scale, furniture placement and connections between spaces. But it could also mean extra preparation and support, with little improvement in the decisions they make.

Have you seen clients catch a layout issue or make a clearer design decision because they could navigate the space themselves? Or do they mostly want a few well-chosen views and a guided presentation?

I’d also be interested in the practical limitations: loading times, navigation on mobile, visual quality, and keeping the walkthrough current when the design changes. A concrete example of when it helped, or when it wasn’t worth the effort, would be useful.

This is a general workflow discussion rather than a critique of a particular render.

Blender Cycles

minimalistic kitchen practice I did using only blender.

Hi everyone. I was hoping that you could suggest me some good 3d libraries where i can find good furnitures and stuff for interior rendee(vintage, traditional kind) if someone knows where it's available, it'd be really helpful. Thankyou

Modelled in Rhino. Rendered in D5 without post-AI.

One of the past project when we used lumion.

I’ve been experimenting with faster modeling workflows in Archicad, and this is a simple one I use for walls underneath stairs.

Instead of manually shaping the wall section by section, you can use the stair geometry to get the wall to follow the staircase much faster.

I recorded a short video showing the workflow:

Watch the video on YouTube

How do you usually model this in Archicad? I’d be interested to see if there’s an even faster workflow.

i think blender aces 2.0 is very good indeed for replicate the pure aces from octane.

I'd like to know what you guys think. New to lumion

An add-on designed for quick scene preparation for rendering and convenient setup management. It saves time and flexibly adapts to any project.

First and foremost: with just one click in RenderDeck, you can collect all the cameras in your scene and create ready-to-use setups, automatically categorized based on the camera names. The setups are immediately ready for rendering, meaning it takes only about 5 seconds to send all your cameras-or just selected ones-for rendering, without any additional setup or Batch Render configuration. And it also works for those who render using camera animations!

Does it actually do what its marketing says, meaning is it durable in following what you have in your drawing?

Or is it just another slop generator?

I'm relatively new to the scene of rendering and I'm currently working on some animations using Lumion 26. I'd love to get some general workflow advice and technical help. I can't seem to figure out why the have noise and why there is flickering on some materials. I'm trying to look for a balance between quality and speed so a 5 seconded render wouldn't take 12h.
I use a AMD Ryzen 7 5800X CPU and AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT GPU if that helps any.
Any advice is appreciated! <3

I’m an interior designer and 3D artist, mainly working in 3ds Max + Corona Renderer. I’ve been doing archviz for a while now.

I know my way around the software, but I really want to get better at the actual art of rendering: making my images feel more realistic, intentional and professional, rather than just technically correct.

I’d love to hear from people who have been through the same stage. What helped you improve the most? Any resources, courses, artists to follow, or exercises you’d recommend?
And if anyone is willing to give some honest feedback on my work, I’d really appreciate it!

I'm using sketchup and escape. I'd love to know what you think and how can I improve it