Interior Walkthrough Animation

The Capstone at Port Imperial is a residential building on the Hudson waterfront in West New York, New Jersey. For the Capstone project we rebuilt one of its apartments in Unreal Engine 5, modelled to the real layout and dimensions, then furnished it end to end with the Wallniture range: picture ledges above the sofa, floating shelves in the living room and the study, a rail and hooks in the kitchen, mat and towel storage in the bathroom, and a peg board at the entry.

The lighting is fully baked, which is what lets the apartment run in real time rather than as a fixed set of camera angles. The finished film is a 2:52 guided pass through the space, naming each piece as the camera reaches it.

They are two different products, and the choice is about what the walkthrough has to do. A film follows a camera path we design, is cut to music, and plays anywhere: on a website, in a listing, on a screen in a sales suite. A real-time walkthrough is a scene someone explores themselves, choosing where to look and which room to enter next.

Real-time changes the economics of reviewing a design as well. In our Unreal Engine kitchen walkthrough, lighting, finishes and layout can be adjusted and reviewed live instead of waiting on a render between every revision. Baking the lighting removes the render queue entirely, and many projects end up with both: the real-time scene is built first, and the film is recorded from it.

A designer presenting to a homeowner has to show where things sit as well as how they look, and a sequence of rooms explains a plan in a way that separate stills cannot. Our Northstar residence work for a California interior design studio was built room by room: a double-height living room, a dining room under lit display cabinetry, a pale marble kitchen, a wine room behind glass, and the bathrooms.

Working for a design studio means being accurate to the design rather than improving on it. The scheme is usually settled down to the tile format and the tap finish, and what the studio is buying is an image their own client will approve from, so the materials have to read correctly at a glance. A walkthrough holds that standard over every frame of the camera’s path, not just the angles chosen for stills.

An apartment that is still a floor plan can be walked through at its real dimensions, furnished and lit, before anyone can visit it. That is the use the Capstone build was made for: a real building’s layout, reproduced to scale, so a viewer judges the space as it will be rather than imagining it from a plan. A show home that does not exist yet costs a build, not a fit-out.

The same scene serves the whole campaign: a walkthrough film for the website and the listing, vertical cuts for social, stills from every room, and a real-time version for the sales suite.

A walkthrough is also the most convincing way to show a product in use. The Capstone apartment exists to show Wallniture’s shelving at its real height on a real wall, next to furniture at the right scale, under the light that room actually gets, which is a different thing from a product on a white background.

Kitchen makers and tile brands get the same advantage. A kitchen range can be walked through in every finish from one scene, and a tile collection can be laid through a hallway, a bathroom and a kitchen in one continuous move. We cover both in more detail on our kitchen and cabinetry and tile visualization pages.