Product · · 6 min read
Your render studio, now in the browser
No workstation, no licences, no farm queue. What a browser tab can and cannot do for architectural visualisation in 2026 — and what the numbers look like next to the pipeline it replaces.
A render studio used to be a room. A workstation with a card in it that cost more than the desk, a licence for the renderer, a plugin for the exporter, a second machine for when the first one was busy, and an account with a farm for the night before a deadline. The room was not the point. The point was one image, and the room existed because the image took twelve hours to compute.
It does not any more. AlphaRender is a browser tab: you upload the model you already have, choose a mood from presets, and about 68 seconds later you are looking at 10–20 finished directions. The computation still happens — it happens on our machines, not on yours, and the difference is that you are not waiting for it in a room.
What actually moved into the tab
Four things that used to be local, and one that used to be a phone call:
- The hardware. There is no GPU requirement, because the render does not run on your machine — a laptop on hotel wifi opens the same project as the tower in the studio.
- The licences. Nothing is installed and nothing is versioned. The tools update while you are not looking at them.
- The exporters. OBJ and FBX out of 3ds Max, Blender, SketchUp or Rhino go straight in; JPG and PNG references go in beside them.
- The queue. Up to eight generations run in parallel across your projects, so a heavy exterior does not hold up the interior you moved on to.
- The farm booking. There is nothing to book. A generation costs one credit, and a credit is the same price at four in the afternoon and at four in the morning.
The four moves
The whole pipeline is four steps, and three of them take seconds. They are laid out in full on how it works; this is the short version.
Upload the model you already have
An untextured massing model is the normal input — no UVs, no material library, no cleanup pass. The camera you framed in your editor comes with it.
Set the mood with presets
Lighting, environment, materials, atmosphere, people and vegetation are dials rather than sentences. Nothing has to be described in words, so nothing gets lost in translation.
Generate
One click, one credit, about 68 seconds, and 10–20 photoreal directions come back at 1080p — a set to choose from rather than a single frame to accept or reject.
Upscale and export
Push the frames you keep to 4K or 8K, add a ten-second video if the project needs motion, and export PNG, JPEG or MP4.
- ≈ 68 s
- to the first frame
- 10–20
- directions per run
- 4K · 8K
- on the frames you keep
- from $9.99
- per month
The numbers next to the old pipeline
We ran the same OBJ scene, the same camera and the same brief through four routes in March 2026 and stopped the clock at the first client-ready image — not the best one, the first acceptable one. The full comparison and its caveats are on their own page, and the caveats matter: scene complexity moves render times, and farm and studio rates vary by region.
- One photoreal image: 68 seconds here, about five minutes on a generic AI tool, 6–12 hours on a render farm, 3–5 days through a CGI studio.
- Cost per image: $0.66 against $3–5, $40–80 and $120 or more.
- A ten-option revision round after a client comment: 41 minutes and $6.60, against one to two days on a farm and one to two weeks through a studio.
“At OMA Studio, we are currently planning to integrate your tool into our workflow and use it in all of our future projects. For our team, AlphaRender is truly a promising solution.”
Tigran Grigoryan, CEO & Founder, omaofficial.com
Where the old room still wins
It would be dishonest to pretend the browser has eaten everything. There are jobs a classic pipeline still owns, and knowing which ones saves you an afternoon:
- Long-form animation. AlphaRender generates ten-second video from a still; a two-minute flythrough with choreographed camera work is still a farm job.
- Contractual documentation. A render is a decision aid here, not a drawing set — dimensions, schedules and tolerances live in your CAD.
- Exact product replication. If a client has specified one particular chair by SKU, model it or place it; a preset describes a family of chairs, not that one.
Everything before those three — the concept, the shortlist, the mood, the board that goes into the meeting on Thursday — is what the tab is for.
Starting tonight
Entry is $9.99 a month, one seat, image generation at 1080p, and the first month carries 30 welcome credits on top of the 50 the plan includes. Upscaling, video and extra credits start on Basic at $99; teams get shared projects and roles on Pro and Studio. The plans are laid out here, and if you would rather watch before you sign up, all fifteen lessons play on the site without an account.
Questions we get
- Do I need a powerful computer or a graphics card?
- No. The generation runs on our servers and the interface is a normal web page, so any machine that can run a current browser can run the whole workflow, including the 8K upscale.
- Which 3D editors does it work with?
- Anything that exports OBJ or FBX — 3ds Max, Blender, SketchUp and Rhino are the common ones. There is no plugin to install on either side.
- Can several people work on the same project?
- Yes, from the Pro plan up: three seats on Pro, ten on Studio, with shared projects, roles and history. Starter and Basic are single-seat plans.
- What happens to my models and renders?
- They stay in your projects and export as PNG, JPEG or MP4 whenever you want them. If you need specific terms for a client — retention, dedicated servers, an audit log — that is what the Enterprise plan covers.
