The tools got good while I wasn't paying attention.

And I had to find out the hard way.

I held off on AI rendering for a long time.

Not because I didn't try it. I did the old thing.. dropped a render in, saw what came out, and wrote the whole thing off. Those early tools were a disaster. They'd invent windows that weren't there. Change the geometry. Swap the materials. It would come back looking like a completely different building.

So I kept doing it myself.

Good light, the right time of day, playing with shadows, dialling in the materials until it felt right. That part felt like mine. It was one of the few parts of the process I didn't want to hand off.

But something changed while I was busy ignoring it.

These models aren't guessing anymore.

Feed it a clean render now and it just.. makes it real. The light lands the way light actually lands. The shadows do what shadows do. The textures read like a photograph of something that hasn't been built yet.

It's not inventing things. It's not changing your building. It's just making it look like it exists.

I resisted because I enjoyed that part of the process. The craft of it. The hour lost chasing the right angle and the right atmosphere.

That hour is gone now.

The AI renders are better than mine.. and that's a weird thing to sit with when you've spent years getting good at something. But here we are.

The tools got good. Might as well use them.