Your DWG, rendered as a photograph

AutoCAD .dwg files, read from model space. It does not read .dxf, Revit or SketchUp files yet. Drop the .dwg in beside the site photos when you start a project, or import it into one you already have.

No. Nothing in the drawing is edited. Every render is a new layer under the drawing in Project Studio, and Compare lays each one over the shot it was rendered from.

Each view starts as a picture of the 3D model built from your file, and the render is an edit of that picture, asked to keep every shape's position, size and outline and change only the surfaces. Then everything in view is measured where you drew it: the roof, driveway, bare pad, paving, trees, water, burgundy tree, green tree, shrubs, flowering plants, planting beds, deck, stoop, house walls, fence, low walls and boulders, stepping stones, furniture, fire pit, edging, column, structure, water feature, gravel, hard surface, open ground and lawn. Every tree, burgundy tree, green tree, shrub, flowering plant, fence, stepping stone, piece of furniture, fire pit, column, structure and water feature is looked for on its own, so one that’s missing is named. A render that is off is made again from scratch, up to 3 times at no extra cost. The verdict is shown under every render: how many things are in place, and what’s off. If no attempt passes, the closest is still delivered, marked “Failed check”; one we couldn’t measure is marked “Not checked”.

What each thing is made of is read from your drawing — a label that says “paver” or “stone”, a hatch’s pattern — and the 3D model, and every render made from it, wears it: 62 real materials, with trees and shrubs grown inside the canopies you drew. Where the drawing says nothing, we guess and mark it as our guess. Click anything on the model to see what it is made of and change it, free, before you spend a credit. A material your drawing names that we don’t have stays a plain colour, never something close.

Not from the 3D model: its cameras sit at drone height, 20° to 89° down, because the file holds no heights for what a person standing in the garden would see. For eye level, Walk around puts the design into your own photo of the site, from where you stood.

An area is named by what is inside it first — its hatch, a label written in it, the plants drawn in it — and only then by the layers of the lines around it, read as whole words in common naming and the National CAD Standard (L-PLNT, A-WALL…). A label that states a size, a height or a material is honoured. Before you spend a credit you see what was read: what it found, every height or roof it assumed, and any layer it couldn't use, which is still drawn as you drew it. Send us your naming and we add it.

9 credits a view: 45 for the plan and all four sides, 9 for a view you frame or a walk around. The credits are taken before rendering, and re-renders while the check fails are free. A view we can’t make is refunded. It is on every Project Studio plan and the Project Pass.

Yes. Project Studio plans and the Project Pass carry a commercial licence on everything you export, and a professional plan can put your logo on the downloads.