Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings
(antirender.com)1810 points by iambateman 2 days ago
1810 points by iambateman 2 days ago
Maybe a real picture of the actual bridge was in the training set? Similar to how prompting for a story about a boy wizard can result in verbatim Harry Potter passages.
I think they use their eyes to see the Peace Bridge and were saying it's fairly close to their experience. :D
That's literally thw worst pic I can find of that bridge and it's still looks good even with the temporary fences: https://www.flickr.com/photos/zawaski/52752097083/
I wonder if there's a way to design the materials of the buildings to defend against the depressing November lighting. With this reflective material however, summers would be unbearably bright. To solve that perhaps there's a way to make the absorption increase with temperature. Darker, less reflective color in summer, and bright reflective color in winter.
Would love to see the original prompt for Nano Banana from OP somewhere. One that yields decent results, for me, is:
{ "image_generation_prompt": { "subject_focus": { "primary": "Architectural exterior scene", "constraint": "Strictly preserve original building geometry, facade details, and structural layout", "reference_adherence": "High structural fidelity to input image" }, "environment_and_season": { "season": "Late November, very late autumn", "weather": "Post-rain, overcast, gloomy, high humidity", "sky": "Heavy grey cloud cover, diffuse white/grey light, no direct sunlight", "ground_texture": "Wet asphalt/pavement, highly reflective puddles, wet concrete, scattering of wet brown decaying leaves" }, "vegetation_details": { "trees": "Leafless branches, dormant skeletal trees, sparse lingering brown foliage", "color_palette": "Desaturated greens, browns, greys, russet, damp earth tones", "state": "Winter-ready, wet bark, dormant landscaping" }, "human_element": { "density": "Sparse, minimal crowd", "clothing": "Heavy winter coats, scarves, boots, muted colors", "activity": "Walking briskly to avoid cold, holding closed wet umbrellas, hurrying, heads down against the wind", "mood": "Solitary, cold, urban transit" }, "photographic_style": { "medium": "Realistic architectural photography", "camera": "35mm lens, sharp focus on architecture", "tone": "Cinematic, moody, desaturated, cool color temperature, blue-grey tint", "quality": "8k resolution, high dynamic range, hyper-realistic textures" } } }
It's on Lovable so you can just fork it and take a look (the prompt is in supabase/functions/transform-render/index.ts):
Transform this idealized architectural rendering into the most brutally realistic, depressing photograph possible. This is the WORST CASE scenario - what the building will actually look like in reality:
- Set on a dreary, grey, overcast late November day with flat, lifeless lighting - The sky is a uniform dirty grey, threatening rain - All trees are completely bare - just skeletal branches against the grey sky - The landscaping is dead, muddy, or non-existent. No lush gardens, just patchy brown grass and bare dirt - Remove ALL people, the scene should feel empty and abandoned - Any water features should look stagnant and grey - Add realistic weathering, dirt streaks, and construction residue on the building - The building materials should look how they actually appear, not the idealized clean version - Include visible utility boxes, drainage grates, and other mundane infrastructure usually hidden in renders - The overall mood should be bleak but realistic - this is what buyers will actually see on a random Tuesday in late autumn - Maintain the exact building, angle, and composition, just strip away all the marketing polish
The goal is honest truth, not beauty. Show what the architect's client will actually see when they visit the site.
>> Remove ALL people, the scene should feel empty and abandoned
That really captures the vibe in Kendall square on the weekend, but for maximum "honest truth" there should be double-parking, delivery trucks and ubers stuck in traffic waiting on a thousand people to scurry across the street from the subway entrance, huddling against the cold. Some dirty snowbanks and grey slush puddles in the crosswalks would really nail it.
It feels Snapchat already has beauty filters as standard. Or you can also spot the beauty filters glitching out all the girls dancing on Tiktok/IG, e.g. their eyelashes would be somewhere else for a split second...
Hah, like connected cars talking to each other, the AR goggles/lenses will talk to each other so each person can broadcast a unified beautifed version of their face to others.
Maybe the Grok AR goggles will have Grok features...
"MORE" by Mark Osborne (1999) did it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCeeTfsm8bk
Can we re-engineer LSD so the only effect we can get is how colors look 12 hours afterwards?
You're supposed to look at an architectural render and recognize it as such. Much like a fashion sketch, the goal is to show the designer's intent rather than a real-world application. If I were a client and an architect handed me these literal Cyberpunk 2077 screenshots, I'd be confused about what exactly he actually designed.
I currently have a landscape designer planning our yard landscaping. When I see the impressive renderings they produced I immediately thought that it’s some idealized version of how it will look on a sunny day after 10 years of bedding in. I asked them to also produce renders of how it’ll look on a gloomy winter day 6 months after planting everything. Seems they don’t have the tools to produce those images really though
One takeaway for me is how important landscaping is to making a space beautiful.
That actually makes it much more useful as a render, it feels like a real building.
It would probably sell better, because you’re just showing them how their building will look, instead of how it might look.
I hope this helps to return some sense into the architectural bureaus that live in their ivory towers of "trendy" architectural styles of modernism or brutalism. Too smug to ask what people actually prefer, too detached from reality to realize how their sterile monstrosities would look in real life.
This would be useful if it actually did some reasoning about the effects of aging on different materials, consequences of certain design decisions, etc. It's not doing that at all, and so it's just misleading instead. If you actually built these things and took pictures years later it wouldn't look like this. Some things would look better and some would look worse. So you can't use this to make decisions about what to build.
No, it would look like this, just not exactly like this. Say, the fancy bridge example has some rust runoff but no obvious metal for it to come from. Other than that, the guess is quite believable, and certainly much more so than the render.
For the bridge, I love how it added a bunch of electrical wires along the top. Imo that’s not very realistic, given there are tons of better places to run wires on a bridge, but somehow it does look substantially more realistic. Even though it seems to be trying to make everything look sad I honestly find the results more inviting because they look lived in.
I do something similar with my Curation Engine outputs. Interesting to get photorealistic outputs on a GPU via language pathing instead of photons.
I like how it adds random electrical boxes everywhere.
And water meters too. And the rust on all the welds is chefs kiss.
Need this in AR to un-Dubai everything.
20 years ago buildings never turned out like their renderings promised but now they do.
I hope someday soon computers will be fast enough to have such filter running as a Fallout New Vegas mod and it will finally look like it should :) https://imgur.com/a/XBVnKZa
I am very curious if this app is making money or are users just using the two generators and then leaving? If so I am very impressed with your wrapper around the image gen models.
I can imagine the reverse model could be very profitable with every real estate agent using it to make dreary photos look great.
Reverse model aimed at estate agents already posted in this thread by someone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46829566
A new CA law is addressing this somewhat:
> Under Assembly Bill 723, real estate agents and brokers who display photos of a home that have been digitally altered with editing software or artificial intelligence must include a “reasonably conspicuous” statement “disclosing that the image has been altered.”
https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/article/california-la...
Apply it to every scene in a random Wes Anderson movie and call it "Depression"
Now if you can do the same for photos of women from dating profiles, you have a million dollar idea.
I am patiently waiting for LARP AR glasses that have all kinds of these filters.
Aha, make it drab, soviet, and raining filter. Peak hipster, I love it.
Holy shit, always been my dream to hit #1 on HN and now it was with something that took me 10min to build in Lovable. Wild!
My first reaction was that it's really great, but almost immediately I got a hold on myself: look, maybe you can argue for the cracks on the road under certain conditions, but surely it didn't have to put transformer booths and collectors where weren't drawn. It doesn't "make the render reality", it's just another "AI"-slop machine, producing the same slop as the "originals" usually are, just with the instruction to make it look sad, instead of making it look happy. Two lies don't make one truth.
Wow. Umm, the "free generations" limit is running on a client-based honour system...
Did someone try to connect output to the input for several iterations, to make it progressively more Poland?
I did a similar thing for anti image censorship, back in 2022-2023 with ML, basically all available APIs were returning image classifications that would tell you if something was adult, used in order to not display the image
I wanted something to tell me what was adult about the image, by feature set, in order to display just those images
Worked pretty well, never released/launched it - just needed more capital for the marketing. But then that market cratered - were were going to use the classification attributes on NFTs, since the marketplaces let collectors sort by attributes, so it would have been easy to "find out the market value of particular physical features", and we could have empirical data on what physical attributes people value, instead of just anecdotes
kind of good that we didn't deal with the NFT market in general, project would still work though, just less revenue from sales possible
Show me reality: vibe coded AI blows up on HN and says "429" (probably... it said non 200 status code, and no F12 to check)
Geez, I'm reminded of a business student's idea of "Uber for photoshoppers" (this is ~20 years ago): you upload your picture, you say what you want changed, and I guess you pick which photoshopper's work looks convincing from a marketplace of them...
He had a website, and the sample pic is a girl lying on her back, and in the "after" picture she's wearing a bigger cup-size..
I don’t see it as lying any more than adjusting exposure or white balance on a camera does.
It doesn’t add or remove anything from the scene, it just fixes bad lighting, color cast, perspective, and sharpness, basically what any decent photographer already does in post.
If anything, it helps photos reflect how the place actually looks in real life instead of dark, crooked, yellowish snapshots.
Just kidding. I bet you will do very well marketing it to estate agents and AirBnb renters. It's just the "prettification" of the world which gets to me. I hate Instagram for the same reason. Just grumpy me.
Totally get the concern, and I actually agree on the “Instagram-ification” problem.
What ProntoPic does is basically what a professional real estate photographer already does in Lightroom: fix lighting, white balance, perspective, and sharpness. No adding pools, no changing furniture, no fake sunsets, no staging things that aren’t there. My girlfriend is an interior designer, so I see firsthand how much effort goes into making spaces look 100% accurate but well presented.
The goal isn’t to misrepresent reality, just to make photos look like they were taken properly.
In practice this mostly helps small hosts and agents who don’t have the budget or time for professional shoots. Right now they’re uploading dark, crooked, yellowish photos that actively hurt bookings (like the ones in the hp, real examples).
I guess I need to make it clearer in the site. Thank you for the feedback!
AI slop. The more you look at an image the more bizarre stuff you see. Eg. It seems obsessed with various types of electrical substation and junction boxes.
Those things dont just grow like lichen or something, they are planned. It put a bunch of them on the pedestrian bridge as well and a lot of fat cables like from Akira or something.
The absolutely 100% leafless trees stretched my suspension of disbelief a bit. They look less like "end of fall/beginning of winter" and more like "dead".
Also, the model goes a bit overboard with the electrical appliances. I had to laugh at the bridge one.
Apart from that, it's a great idea!
That's like every new building I've seen around here. Developers plant trees directly into compacted soil and then they grow half a foot within 10 years and then die in a hot summer. The building owner then just leaves them in because it's easier than taking them out.
I have to say both the leafless trees and electrical box spawning is very on point for what you would find in eg Belgium. Check this full blown ugly building/container that spawned in the beautiful Liege Guillemins station https://maps.app.goo.gl/T1J7WwCCYDvBgJEc7
Maybe.. or maybe you underestimate the insanities you can find in real life too (the model isnt that creative unfortunately). See here, 5 different no-parking signs for the same 2 spots: https://maps.app.goo.gl/S74r7eawH2vL24CX7
That's funny, the second example is the Peace Bridge in Calgary.
On a nice day the render actually looks close to the real thing!