From still renders to a walkable building: image-to-video and Claude are rewriting how architecture gets shown
For years the architecture visualization industry has been stuck with a strange limit. Studios can produce a still render so convincing you cannot tell it from a photograph, but the moment a client wants to move through that space, the cost jumps by an order of magnitude. Animation means cameras, keyframes, render farms, and days of compute per shot. So most projects ship as a handful of gorgeous frozen images, and the sense of actually being there never makes it to the viewer. Two things changed that recently. Image-to-video models can now invent believable motion from a couple of stills. And coding assistants like Claude can turn that footage into a polished, interactive site in an afternoon. I wanted to see how far that combination goes, so I built a small experiment. This is how it went. ...