We recently sat down with Erin and Carlin Guthrie, founders of PANL, to discuss how the 2 person startup innovates construction practices in the USA. Read on to learn how they harness the capabilities of Visoid to streamline their visualization workflow, overcome traditional rendering challenges, and propel their startup forward.
Founded by Erin and Carlin Guthrie, PANL offers pre-designed, modern home framing kits that revolutionize the construction industry. Their kits, which merge pre-fabricated and traditional construction methods, empower individuals to construct energy-efficient homes swiftly and with exceptional customization potential. Drawing inspiration from mid-century, Japanese, Scandinavian, and organic architecture, they strive to create innovative floor plans and designs that redefine modern living spaces.
Having previously operated a residential design-build firm focusing on historic home renovations, their journey to PANL was driven by a desire to innovate construction practices. The Beta Test house, PANL's initial project, not only serves as their current residence but also informs ongoing enhancements to PANL designs, embodying their commitment to excellence and innovation in every aspect of their work.
In the past, we’ve outsourced renders, but this is often an expensive and tedious process. Typically, we would spend upwards of $500-1000 per image, with long lead times, and difficulty communicating our desires for the finished product. Erin came across Visoid via an online article about AI rendering options, and started testing it out as an alternative rendering option. We were immediately blown away by the images we could get in such a short period of time.
We’ve been using Visoid since fall of 2023. The amazing thing is that as two individuals, we can create content in a matter of hours that would have cost thousands of dollars and weeks to create. We calculated that our use of AI tools is likely saving us $50,000+ over the course of a year. This is game-changing for startups like us, because it allows us to create lots of beautiful content for a fraction of the price.
Visoid could get us images more affordably and much faster with very basic image inputs, which is awesome. But just as importantly, with the AI prompting system, it allowed us to rapidly iterate many different ideas, which has provided a ton of inspiration on our end. It’s amazing when the AI creates something that we weren’t expecting and then provides us with new creative ideas. We definitely find that it enables a lot more artistic creativity than traditional rendering workflows.
Our primary workflow involves Visoid in the middle of the process for rendering.
We start by pulling screenshots of our 3D architectural models - typically with finish materials that are close to our desired output.
Sometimes, we will layer other objects (i.e. background or plants) onto the screenshot in Photoshop, or we’ll just bring the image directly into Visoid.
Next, we render a variety of options from the base image in Visoid and we’ll test multiple input settings and prompts.
Last, we bring our top pics into Photoshop Beta for final editing.
As an added step in some cases, we’ll actually pull the final image into Runway, which is an AI video generation software. This lets us turn the Visoid render into a high quality, realistic video.
Thanks to the creative impacts of the renders we get from Visoid, our design process is far more connected between modeling and the final product. By getting renders so quickly, we can more easily iterate our designs based on what we like or don’t like in the renders. This allows us to create better designs since we aren’t so locked into one concept for so long, and we don’t have to worry about the financial cost of changing our plans and getting new renders.
In addition, the capability to render models with diverse finishes or settings greatly benefits those, like us, who approach design and construction as a product-oriented endeavor. It’s super important to visualize our products in different ways, and Visoid makes that so much easier than traditional rendering methods. Since our customers can choose to finish our product however they’d like, it’s extremely important to show a wide variety of material finishes, locations, and use cases. This would cost a literal fortune if we had to outsource rendering for every finish concept we come up with, so it’s very nice to quickly run these through Visoid instead.
👉 Learn more about how PANL is changing the construction industry here.