Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings

https://antirender.com/

by iambateman • 6 months ago

1844 453 6 months ago

antirender.com

yetihehe5• 6 months ago

Wow, someone finally made Poland-filter. It all looks exactly like I'm used to.

dbacar2• 6 months ago

Apart from some lucky places, most of the world cities looks like this or worse.

aaronbrethorst• 6 months ago

That’s the Joke!

b3orn• 6 months ago

Especially in autumn and winter.

eru4• 6 months ago

Singapore does actually look like the renders. By and large.

ex-aws-dude• 6 months ago

That is something I've found over the years with traveling.

You watch a bunch of travel videos and think the place you're visiting is going to be so different but its just the same overcast sky and ocean and washed out color palette as home.

Once you remove all the filters, color correction, and drone shots from influencer travel videos a lot of places look the same IRL.

abraxas2• 6 months ago

Before the dystopian black and gray fad arrived most buildings that went up were sort of OK. And I didn't mind the pastel paint on commie blocks either. But a decade ago someone decided that gray cuboids with asymmetric windows were an improvement...

Even so, I think North American cities are on average uglier than most Polish ones. Overall we're not doing so bad but I want the Slavic city memes to continue lest we get Prague or Amsterdam level tourist invasion.

zdragnar2• 6 months ago

Pretty much any place with brutalist architecture, really. I'll happily take pretty much any revival or classical style over "modern" or brutalist style.

There's nothing more depressing than walking by beautiful historic old buildings only to turn a corner and see a monstrosity of concrete and glass somehow reaching the epitome of bland and uninviting.

bitwize• 6 months ago

Brutalism does make for some sweet Quake maps, however: https://qbj3.slipseer.com/

_kb2• 6 months ago

Hard disagree. This is what brutalism looks like in sunny, subtropical Brisbane, Australia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:QPAC_Exterior.jpg

If the straight concrete isn’t your thing, they’re also currently extending it with a glasshouse: https://www.snohetta.com/projects/queensland-performing-arts...

harimau7772• 6 months ago

I never understood the dislike for brutalist architecture. To me, at least it looks like something. It's got soul and expresses an artistic idea even if that idea is "the overbearing power of the state". Personally, I'd take that over the soulless glass and steel buildings that seem to be today's alternative.

ajmurmann• 6 months ago

As someone who likes many cases of brutalist architecture, I wonder if you'd explains why many of the examples I like are in Mexico whereas many of the negative examples are in the UK.

Nextgrid4• 6 months ago

someone finally made Poland-filter

The UK is feeling left out and would like a word.

Tade0• 6 months ago

The British invented Brutalism, the eastern block perfected it.

pfannkuchen5• 6 months ago

What would happen if you run it on a spacecraft? Blank image comes back?

HPsquared6• 6 months ago

There are plenty of grungy spacecraft images out there.

Buran in storage: https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/baikonur-buran-soviet-...

Image link: https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/17103111131...

xyzal• 6 months ago

There should be a effect intensity slider. East Germany <-> Poland <-> Russia

wffurr2• 6 months ago

It really nails the Boston / MIT campus in November vibe.

OsrsNeedsf2P• 6 months ago

Looks beautiful tbh. I prefer the greyness

yawnxyz2• 6 months ago

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!

shermantanktop• 6 months 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.

iambateman• 6 months ago

I think they use their eyes to see the Peace Bridge and were saying it's fairly close to their experience. :D

torben-friis• 6 months ago

I think the third is plaza de España in Madrid, Spain. I was actually wondering why it looked familiar.

sonar_un• 6 months ago

Third one is definitely Madrid, I live there. I can say that the real life looks much better than the Antirender image.

mmastrac• 6 months ago

The bridge looks much better than the anti-shine version in person (no boxes!), though they replaced the glass due to vandalism.

yawnxyz2• 6 months ago

Yeah that's what I mean, I love crossing the Peace Bridge

brailsafe• 6 months ago

Ya it actually looks quite good

smnrchrds• 6 months ago

From the site: Get back what it'll actually look like on a random Tuesday in November

It's Calgary. The landscape will be a lot snowier anytime in November.

mxfh3• 6 months ago

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/

b450• 6 months ago

I ran it on the "society if..." meme lol

https://imgur.com/a/nFQN5tx

Toutouxc2• 6 months ago

Looks like Machinarium. I like it.

sebmellen• 6 months ago

What a beautiful and nostalgic game that was. I’ve never had a game hit me like that since!

rollinDyno• 6 months ago

This is just Moscow

CGMthrowaway2• 6 months ago

OK this is too fun. I did Reverse Anti-Render on a dreary scene in Moscow:

https://imgur.com/a/mqMEPUl

wiseowise2• 6 months ago

Too clean.

ErroneousBosh2• 6 months ago

Or Dundee. The third "after" pic needs more Surron tracks up the grassy bank though.

comonoid• 6 months ago

It seems you haven't been to Moscow for the last 20 years. With all the oil money + cheap workforce it looks much better than EU capitals.

It is rather Novosibirsk.

smsm42• 6 months ago

Ugh, this looks way too real...

palmotea• 6 months ago

For those like me not up on the hip memes: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-world-if

echelon• 6 months ago

It's funny to see as a joke, but you can go the other way with this too. Image editing models and LoRAs for "previz-to-render upscaling" workflows are actually incredibly useful.

I was just writing about this (scroll about halfway down to the images of Sam Altman - though if you like that, do watch the second video):

https://getartcraft.com/news/world-models-for-film

The best model I've found for this, that almost bakes in full ControlNet capability, is oddly gpt-image-1.5. It's absolutely OP at understanding how to turn low-fidelity renders into final draft upscales.

Here are some older experiments:

https://imgur.com/a/previz-to-image-gpt-image-1-5-3fq042U

https://imgur.com/gallery/previz-to-image-gpt-image-1-x8t1ij...

https://imgur.com/aOliGY4

I just wish it didn't require invoking such heavy-weight, slow, and expensive models to do this. I'm sure open models will do this work soon, though.

GenerocUsername• 6 months ago

It's funny how know your meme has to sanitize the 4chan out of memes.

The 'how society would look without x' has been a racist trope on 4chan since way before the cited examples.

lostlogin• 6 months ago

What’s going on with that (robot?) dog leash?

lloydatkinson• 6 months ago

Does anyone have a mirror? I’m in authoritarian UK so the link is blocked

Analemma_2• 6 months ago

If you're in the UK in January, you can probably just look outside and that's approximately it.

RealCodingOtaku• 6 months ago

The rimigo proxy works for me: https://rimgo.vern.cc/a/nFQN5tx

reallydoubtful• 6 months ago

The link is blocked by imgur themselves, not the British government (authoritarian or otherwise), because the ICO was going to fine them for historic poor handling of children's data. https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-blogs...

Imustaskforhelp6• 6 months ago

Does anyone have a mirror? I’m in authoritarian UK so the link is blocked

Here you go. I had it uploaded after hearing from the magospietato's comment but then saw you talk about the same so I am pasting the same image link here as well

https://files.catbox.moe/c4smhd.png

fredley• 6 months ago

As someone in the UK, this was especially chilling.

varispeed• 6 months ago

For context, internet has been nerfed in the UK, because of Epstein scandal politicians there started thinking too much of the children.

culhatsker• 6 months ago

the world if autumn comes

vvpan• 6 months ago

You are a genius.

junon2• 6 months ago

This was the first thing I thought of, and it's gotten the hug of death now; thank you for uploading it.

Gibbon1• 6 months ago

If it could add mold and rust stains to the concrete it'd be perfect.

jbverschoor• 6 months ago

Wrong country

magospietato• 6 months ago

Complete aside, but it's beyond infuriating I need to enable a VPN here in the UK to view this link.

HPsquared6• 6 months ago

It's ironic because it looks like a picture of a dilapidated 2000s "millennium park" type of location which are common in the UK.

Imustaskforhelp6• 6 months ago

Complete aside, but it's beyond infuriating I need to enable a VPN here in the UK to view this link.

Here, I uploaded the image to catbox.moe if anyone's interested.

https://files.catbox.moe/c4smhd.png

I don't think that catbox is blocked within the UK.

nicbvs• 6 months ago

This looks like the average abandoned World's fair location from the 2000s

jansan• 6 months ago

That may be quite close to the truth. Here are pictures from some abandones pavilions from the 2000 World Expo in Hannover. Sad to see this, as I lived in Hannover at that time and had a really good time at the Expo.

https://vergesseneorte.com/die-expo2000-in-hannover/

HPsquared6• 6 months ago

Looks like a lot of the "millennium" architecture (late 90s-early 00s) we have around my home city.

CodesInChaos2• 6 months ago

Your image made the reddit front page: https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/1qrwa2l/society_with...

TeMPOraL• 6 months ago

For however brief a moment. It's gone now.

tucnak• 6 months ago

Thank you for submitting to /r/memes. Unfortunately, your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):
Rule 1 - ALL POSTS MUST BE MEMES AND FOLLOW A GENERAL MEME FORMAT
All posts must be memes following typical setup/design: an image/gif/video with some sort of caption; mods have final say on what is (not) a meme

Reddit mods, man.

Imustaskforhelp6• 6 months ago

I was also wondering how the image got 16k+ views (as of now) (the stat was on imgur)

I was wondering what/how many HN users clicked on the image (not knowing it was uploaded to reddit too)

But now I seriously wonder out of those 16k (as of now), how many were/are from the hackernews community and how many from reddit.

ricardobeat• 6 months ago

So the future looks like... Germany?

Kye• 6 months ago

This looks like a scene out of Enterprise.

egorfine2• 6 months ago

This is ingenious and actually useful. I'm looking for a new apartment and I always wanted to know how do these places look in a bad weather, because that's when I need beautiful surroundings the most.

wizzwizz42• 6 months ago

Unfortunately, it doesn't actually tell you that information: it just turns a dial. What you want is to know how much that dial would be turned by bad weather.

egorfine2• 6 months ago

It's infinitely better than nothing.

Retr0id• 6 months ago

As long as it's not changing the form of the buildings, it seems valid. Although, the first two examples both add random telecom cabinets in places that don't make much sense.

coffeebeqn2• 6 months ago

Depends where you live I guess. For me that looks exactly like November here

ziml77• 6 months ago

They still look great on a rainy November day. A nice cozy, quiet vibe.

poly2it2• 6 months ago

This filter seems to also change some architectural details and features, as well as degrade the quality of some materials in an unrealistic way.

Tiberium3• 6 months ago

It's not a filter, it's an image editing model

poly2it2• 6 months ago

This drink is not a smoothie, it is a blend of fruits and berries.

Applejinx2• 6 months ago

How is it not just a midjourney prompt? The liberties it takes seem to be better described by 'upload a picture, and AI will be told to make it dingier'. Can't people already do that ad nauseam?

mckirk• 6 months ago

That's the 'built by the lowest bidder' feature. Probably pretty realistic in a lot of places.

netsharc3• 6 months ago

Huh, I wonder if they trained it by feeding it architectural renders and "what actually got built" photos...

lucaslazarus• 6 months ago

Au contraire, in a rather realistic way

lambda• 6 months ago

It's GenAI. It does something that's kind of like what you asked it to do, but it will skip some details or add other ones or whatever.

Dreary architectural pictures will be more likely to have electrical boxes, poor materials, etc, so when it moves the buildings from the latent space for cheery bright architectural renderings to dreary wet November architectural renderings, it will be more likely to add some of those details, because that's what's in its latent space.

Don't expect GenAI to be magic.

kazinator• 6 months ago

I have a suspicion that the author of this might have asked the model for those utility boxes.

bloody_bocker• 6 months ago

Yeah - same things I noticed with people enthusiastically using genAI for old photo coloring. Initially it looks awesome, until you realize it can even alter the human face in such a way, that it no longer looks like that person.

My father was really happy with some old photos colored, until I pointed out he does not look like him. Strangely enough he wasnt bothered...

teruakohatu• 6 months ago

I put in an image and it generated piles of shipping pallets along a walkway.

It also added drainage that would actually improve the building.

karel-3d• 6 months ago

It's AI, it makes things up.

nickandbro2• 6 months ago

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.

luckydata• 6 months ago

this landing page is a lead gen tool for the architect at the bottom

nickandbro2• 6 months ago

Ahh, I see that. Thanks

londons_explore• 6 months ago

I can imagine the reverse model could be very profitable with every real estate agent using it to make dreary photos look great.

joshuaissac• 6 months ago

Reverse model aimed at estate agents already posted in this thread by someone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46829566

Tiberium3• 6 months ago

Nano Banana is indeed a powerful model :)

haunter• 6 months ago

Used it on some Fortnite screenshots, I'd play that depressing version!

https://files.catbox.moe/i8tfkl.jpg

https://files.catbox.moe/mw8vbc.jpg

Then I thought what would it make from an already dark and grim scene, like HL2 Ravenholm

https://files.catbox.moe/d7z77h.jpg

but nothing really? Just made the whole thing a different color scheme + changed some architecture

dasil003• 6 months ago

Halfway to The Last of Us conversion for Fortnite

assaddayinh2• 6 months ago

They stole the ravenholm sign

crazysim• 6 months ago

It really tied the place together.

nicbou• 6 months ago

That looks like a specific level in Left for Dead 2

ksherlock• 6 months ago

Sandy Strip is a low rent strip club right? Based on the name and logo it can't be anything else... Anyhow, that looks like GTA to me.

Applejinx2• 6 months ago

Nice, it made it back into PUBG :)

chrysoprace• 6 months ago

I mean now they just look like early Fortnite!

djsavvy• 6 months ago

It's interesting that the video game style of the images is still preserved. I actually expected the outputs to look like real photographs for some reason.

ZeWaka• 6 months ago

Fallout!

VorpalWay2• 6 months ago

That first scene especially looks like straight out of Fallout 4 but with a better lighting engine.

notjustanymike• 6 months ago

Top: Sandy Strip

Bottom: Shady Sands

mproud2• 6 months ago

Top one having some Fallout vibes.

Nevermark• 6 months ago

And the real killer app of contact lens AR will be ... this in reverse.

viraptor2• 6 months ago

That's black mirror level content.

mkturkcan• 6 months ago

One of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth books features this as a whole chapter, the first of the Cugel books I believe. I don’t know of an earlier appearance of the concept.

Nition• 6 months ago

"MORE" by Mark Osborne (1999) did it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCeeTfsm8bk

netsharc3• 6 months ago

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...

colechristensen• 6 months ago

Can we re-engineer LSD so the only effect we can get is how colors look 12 hours afterwards?

DrPhish• 6 months ago

Very “futurological congress” thought

IshKebab2• 6 months ago

Ha this is great - I always thought this would be a brilliant application for AI.

PenguinRevolver• 6 months ago

Wow. Umm, the "free generations" limit is running on a client-based honour system...

niyazpk• 6 months ago

It would be great if I can run this as a browser extension that works on Zillow and Redfin.

raffa6674• 6 months ago

I did exactly the opposite with https://prontopic.com

willguest• 6 months ago

thanks for helping people to lie

netsharc3• 6 months ago

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..

raffa6674• 6 months ago

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.

wateralien10• 6 months ago

Works great. I hate it.

wateralien10• 6 months ago

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.

assaddayinh2• 6 months ago

Used it on the line. That got dark fast..

purplecats• 6 months ago

does this work on people

fragmede2• 6 months ago

Just wait till Meta comes out with AR glasses that do!

wbobeirne• 6 months ago

Getting a 402 error payment required when I try to run this, I'm guessing all of the credits for the API account have been used up. Great idea though!

gedy• 6 months ago

It's some Loveable app thing. Fun idea though

archy_• 6 months ago

I keep getting "Edge Function returned a non-2xx status code." Run out of tokens?

Gracana• 6 months ago

Same here. Disappointing. I wanted to run it on that picture of a church that looks like a chicken.

leoh2• 6 months ago

I wanted to run it on renders from the owner's website

mxfh3• 6 months ago

What is it with people?

Is there some weird force dropping electrical enclosures on bridges (the cables on top even?) and random places in the street.

Those random protruding manholes next to two other drainage gates nowhere near a slope?

Why are these even the examples.

This is just like turning the HDR tone mapping up to 200%

hbs18• 6 months ago

It's not that bad actually. Over the years stuff like electrical installations, cables and random manholes often get retrofitted in an ugly way to existing architecture.

TheJoeMan• 6 months ago

I was actually going to comment on the main post, how well tuned the AI seems with it's placement of random electrical wires and junction boxes that seem to match my impression of renderings-vs-reality.

gloflo• 6 months ago

This is not about accuracy or logic, but for showing a potential feeling and atmosphere of the places.

mxfh3• 6 months ago

And that potential feel is as fake or even less realistic than the renderings it is supposed to criticize, just in the other direction.

ahoka4• 6 months ago

These necessary things are usually missing from the original plans as people who do these have no idea how actually cities function, so oftentimes they are an afterthought and actually look like that. It's like when you look at pictures of electric appliances and they almost always hide the cords.

xg153• 6 months ago

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!

c-fe2• 6 months ago

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

xg153• 6 months ago

Yeah, both are good additions - in moderation. I think the model just went into extremes with them.

drivers99• 6 months ago

If they are young trees along the side of the road, generally they are broken off at the stump by a car before they can grow, and then you're left with an empty tree well.

throwway1203852• 6 months ago

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.

James_K• 6 months ago

British filter.

ronsor• 6 months ago

This does more than remove shine. It makes every building look like it's in the UK!

83• 6 months ago

The rust stains in realistic locations on the bridge is very well done.

Onavo• 6 months ago

It's because of Autodesk BIM no?

GaggiX• 6 months ago

This is just a Nano Banana wrapper I imagine.

chromanoid• 6 months ago

I am patiently waiting for LARP AR glasses that have all kinds of these filters.

abraxas2• 6 months ago

Excellent idea. So many modern buildings age so poorly. Maybe this will give some starchitecs a bit of a pause...

OCASMv23• 6 months ago

Doubt it. Demoralization is what they're after.

TrainedMonkey• 6 months ago

Aha, make it drab, soviet, and raining filter. Peak hipster, I love it.

throwawayk7h• 6 months ago

I like how it adds random electrical boxes everywhere.

throwway1203852• 6 months ago

And water meters too. And the rust on all the welds is chefs kiss.

leoh2• 6 months ago

And the trash cans

modeless• 6 months ago

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.

wateralien10• 6 months ago

This was exhausting to read. Don’t you ever have fun?

deely3• 6 months ago

Let's go to reddit!

fluoridation• 6 months ago

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.

stackedinserter2• 6 months ago

You do to fun what this website does to pictures.

drsalt2• 6 months ago

you are right but this would take actual science and desire to make good things.

Lerc2• 6 months ago

This would be really useful if it came in a real estate photo version. Turn the photos that agents post back into the photos they took.

xd1936• 6 months ago

POST https://fjtwtlaryvoqohkwnbwd.supabase.co/functions/v1/transf... 402 (Payment Required)

Function error: FunctionsHttpError: Edge Function returned a non-2xx status code

drsalt2• 6 months ago

please take this down before architects find this forum

AceJohnny22• 6 months ago

It's like a dream come true!

I've been thinking of something like this for decades, as I mentally compared the utopian displays at construction sites to the existing buildings next to them. Like "wow your fancy new building is going to be so perfectly white and clean, but what will it really look like after 10 years exposed to the elements and no cleaning, like the one next door?"

New construction is sold on a literal blue-sky promise. How does it really look like a decade down the road? All construction has a decades- if not centuries-long lifespan. It's worth thinking about them long-term.

I absolutely love the streak of rust coming off the saddle of arches on the bridge example. That's exactly what I'm talking about.

wateralien10• 6 months ago

Top of HN and people are loving it, but there's got to be a better way of getting some $$ rewards for fun viral ideas like this than "Buy me a coffee". I'm betting he's got tens of thousands of sessions currently and nobody is tipping. https://ko-fi.com/magnushambleton

Is there a better way? Asking for myself, also.

glaucon• 6 months ago

My view may be as realistic as these architectural drawings but I've long thought that some sort of micro payment system would address a lot of problems, many more significant than tipping software developers.

AceJohnny22• 6 months ago

Thanks for the highlight. Doesn't seem like there's much activity on his Ko-Fi for being on the front page of HN. I sent him a tip, although privately.

Levitating2• 6 months ago

Ideally the model would be run locally in the browser, so the author isn't paying whatever they're paying. But the web standards to do complicated stuff locally aren't there yet and probably will never be.

That's not a practical answer but it's my two cents.

IshKebab2• 6 months ago

All you need is WASM surely? I expect this model is too big to download & run on local CPUs though.

wateralien10• 6 months ago

I wish I could give him two cents without having to try. HTTP status 402 with micropayments or something needs to become a thing. The platforms do it... (subs, tips, donations, rewards etc etc.) Why can't the web.

pibaker2• 6 months ago

This will be an unpopular answer but one way that could have worked is just good ol' advertising, because it directly converts "virality" into income.

Any solution that requires the user to bust out a credit card and put down his billing address has way too much friction for the median user to get through.

wateralien10• 6 months ago

Unfortunately true.

cyode• 6 months ago

I see 16 coffees received. Assuming no private donations for simplicity, that’s $48. As an ads noob, how many sessions would a banner ad need to beat that?

addandsubtract2• 6 months ago

Doesn't an ad require the user to bust out their credit card eventually?

spyder• 6 months ago

Yea, but most advertisers come only after something went viral, not when you are building something and you try to say to potential advertiser: "this will go viral trust me bro". And such small viral things are usually short lived, by the time the advertisers come it will probably starts to die down. But yea, maybe he would have got a little more financial support than donations even if he puts up ads after it went viral.

Another way he could benefit from this is when people want his skills to build them similar things, so it's basically already an advertisement for his skills.

Cyphase• 6 months ago

I don't know the terms, but there's what looks like a tasteful ad at the bottom.

Looking for an architect who builds things that still look great even in November rain? Reach out to classical architect Jorian Egge.

Fuzzwah• 6 months ago

It should be tasteful ads for the AI companies that are making money... Oh wait, I instantly see the problem with that idea.

Lerc2• 6 months ago

There have been alternatives suggested. While better is a subjective term, most alternatives have either not been successful or have not yet meaningfully achieved a level of success to matter.

Flattr took one approach without much success. They represented the problem well though. When someone does something that is of a small but not insignificant benefit for a large number of people, how should they be rewarded? When the reward due, divided by the number of people paying for it, gets low enough it seems to not reach a threshold that it makes sense for any individual to pay.

You could charge a fee above the threshold, and many people do take this path. It is essentially requiring a small number of people to massively overpay to cover those who don't pay at all.

A Universal Income takes the approach that if everyone gets what they need there is no particular requirement to be monetarily rewarded. You essentially have been rewarded for whatever it is you do.

Advertising plays the small threshold thing both ways, They offer you a chance to sell a little corruption below your threshold for thinking it is damaging, and in return they accumulate the corruption and the money and send you the money and deliver the requested corruption to their customers.

Part of the fundamental difficulty is in determining the size of the reward due. How is that determined? There are plenty of people who will offer services to do that if it means they can take a cut. I don't see that path going well unless it is a mechanism governed by strict non-profit rules, and even then I would have doubts.

A purely rule based system would be intrinsically unfair and subject to gaming, but often times this turns out to be the least worst solution. By agreeing to a set of rules people can accept that while flawed, adhering to them by agreement can make a system that cannot be taken over by a malicious individual.

In short, right now, No I don't think there is a better way. There may be people with a financial interest that it remains that way.

falloutx• 6 months ago

Guy who posted this is actually a VC (not sure how big).

huehehue• 6 months ago

I built a browser extension for a hackathon that enabled crypto payments direct to site owners. "registration" was just sticking a formatted payment address in a DNS TXT record, and if you were at a supported website, the extension would light up, and facilitated payment.

I still think it's a neat idea but I can't be bothered to build a real version

smoovb2• 6 months ago

You'd love Brave browser then.

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe9• 6 months ago

I had a similar idea for a library used to collect how much you owe who:

https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/FUTOmeter

Timwi• 6 months ago

Is there a better way?

Yes, UBI. Then you can create what you want and your livelihood doesn't depend on it going viral.

wavemode• 6 months ago

Most people want a lot more out of life than basic necessities.

fragmede2• 6 months ago

what does UBI have to do with getting paid for making cool shit?

OCASMv23• 6 months ago

Nah, that just turns people into slaves of whoever is signing the checks.

pfannkuchen5• 6 months ago

How do we ensure that we don’t enter the failure mode of “not enough necessities get made”?

Like it seems like people are ideologically for or against UBI, but I’ve never seen anyone discuss how the mechanism would avoid this outcome. Like I’m not saying it’s 100% the outcome that would happen on whatever time frame, just that even e.g. a 10% chance of that happening would make it too risky to attempt at scale. And like I don’t accept “some people just love farming” or “a lot of stuff that isn’t needed gets made now”, I need an actual mechanism description.

wartywhoa232• 6 months ago

...and rather depends on the whims of the feeding hand instead.

Like, haven't got your 22nd cocksuckie virus booster? Get lost and die from hunger.

brainwad• 6 months ago

People already freak out about the sustainability of the welfare state supporting just the elderly with worker-dependent ratios of 3:1 or 2:1. Imagine if also all the working age population got welfare, it'd be completely unworkable.

smoovb2• 6 months ago

Youtube has this model with Preimum. If Chrome rolled out Chrome Premium, (and copied the Brave BAT model of paying sites you give attention to), I'd be happy to pay.

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe9• 6 months ago

I had an idea for a library used to collect how much you owe who:

https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/FUTOmeter

mncharity• 6 months ago

Is there a better way?

If one's visitors are gamers, perhaps one might use gaming payment providers to sell an "supporter badge"? But that's perhaps be pushing their envelope.

If one's visitors are from the "rapidly-developing world", with well-adopted candybar-scale micropayment systems - China, India, Indonesia, Brasil, Kenya, SK, Sweden... hmm. Direct access from elsewhere seems still very limited, but perhaps one might use a global payment gateway like Adyen? My impression is transaction cost is more than $0.10 but less than $1.

In the "less-rapidly-developing world", X.com has been working towards a similar superapp with Visa for the US. The Visa/MC duopoly seems to have shifted from its years of preventing US micropayments, to something like "maybe 2030-ish".

arendtio• 6 months ago

Especially in the age of AI tools, I also thought about this a few times. The current idea I have is something like a parking meter. Every expensive transaction (like calling a model) would subtract from the money pool, and every visitor could see how much is still left in the pool. In addition, a list of the top 5 donors with their amounts might improve the group dynamic (like on pay-what-you-want pages like humblebundle.com).

It would be more about covering the cost than about making someone rich, but I think that is what most of the people who build stuff care about. Sadly, I don't know a service yet that offers this model.

202601260326242• 6 months ago

This won't work when the meter is at zero due to human psychology. New visitors will say: "no one subsidized my experience (indeed I don't even know what $thing does) but <creator> wants me to subsidize $thing for others".

The whole "subsidize for other visitors" concept is weaker than "pay <creator>".

HPsquared6• 6 months ago

Nobody likes parking meters.

coffeebeqn2• 6 months ago

Not everything needs to be a business!

throwaway132448• 6 months ago

If there’s one thing I learnt from HN it’s how many people can’t comprehend this. Is it a byproduct of growing up in a very transactional or selfish environment?

xboxnolifes• 6 months ago

Sometimes it would be nice if you could just break even though. Particularly for these AI projects.

eastbound• 6 months ago

Monetization: People can now use ChatGPT for this if they have the idea, so it’s a tight goal. Would people in urban planning pay to see this? If not, then this was just the “15 minutes of fame” experience”, and people who are not career influencers have difficulty monetizing that. Of course, thank you for your concept.

Steve0• 6 months ago

You could let users import their own Google api key...

tpoacher2• 6 months ago

I don't think donation approaches are necessarily bad, but yes it should not be as simple as putting a kofi link at the top of a page.

This person doesn't just do that though. Right after the part where you've uploaded your own examples, there's a reminder: if you had fun buy me a coffee.

Though this is slightly offset by the fact that they state you have 2 free trials and then you pay. It's a complete incentives mismatch if you ask for coffee for something you explicitly presented to them as a marketing offer. Though, I suppose leaving the donation option on doesn't hurt in this case either.

In my experience, donationware works best when the donation request is polite, personal, uncoercive, unintrusive, and comes at a moment of surprise right after you would have seen actual value from a product, and from a product that has not otherwise asked you for any money so far (including showing you ads).

KeepassXC Android is a good example: the guy asks for a beer during octoberfest :)

IAmGraydon2• 6 months ago

Yeah - fine tune it a bit more (it’s a little too worst-case-scenario-in-the-dead-of-winter) and sell it to architectural firms and developers for a fee. This is simple to monetize and not up to us to figure out how to turn processor cycles into dollar bills.

MagnusHambleton2• 6 months ago

I saw it going viral before going to bed last night and spent 15min trying to enable payments but failed so made it block you after 2 gens using cookies and try guilt you into donating instead. Made me $160 in donations compared to the $500 in AI credits burned so not a huge success but at least slightly offset the loss.

If the demand continues after this blip I’ll try add ads or make real payments work.

wateralien10• 6 months ago

I feel like you'll probably (mostly) have two types of users:

1. Those who just want to see more examples.

2. Those who actually want to use this as a tool. (Even though it may have started as a bit of a gag.)

By having a gallery you'd save a lot of needless tokens so that you can satisfy user 1.

By having a paid actual SAAS option you can get $$ from user 2.

By showing a few tasteful ads as well as buy me a coffee you can get income from user 1.

xnx• 6 months ago

Insert product placement/ads into the generated images.

guerrilla• 6 months ago

Okay now do it on character models so that they don't look like plastic dolls.

pavlus• 6 months ago

I imagine, it could actually be useful for architects, to see how other people and environment will butcher their creation, so they could learn how to make it better with that in mind.

Edit: oh, it's right there at the bottom of the page!

VorpalWay2• 6 months ago

Seems fairly simple to me: stop with the naked concrete and brutalist architecture. Old houses before that trend tend to look way nicer regardless of weather. (I'm not an expert on exact architectural style names, so I can't be more exact that that.)

derefr• 6 months ago

Architects aren't generally brutalists themselves, but rather, brutalist architecture proposals win contracts because their TCO is lower. Facades have maintenance costs; bare concrete just requires power-washing now and then.

crancher• 6 months ago

I do something similar with my Curation Engine outputs. Interesting to get photorealistic outputs on a GPU via language pathing instead of photons.

https://dev.zice.app/frame_syntheses

gwbas1c• 6 months ago

(Currently getting an error when I try it)

One think I wish is if I could get it halfway. I don't need it to look dreary, I just want it to look real instead of overly optimistic.

bluedino• 6 months ago

This would be great for real estate ads. Make the rooms look their actual size and dark and dirty. Lived-in, if you will.

cainxinth• 6 months ago

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...

Nextgrid4• 6 months ago

Why is it addressing it? It'll just lead to every single ad having this statement.

To address it you actually need to force them to provide the originals alongside the edited pictures.

jonshariat• 6 months ago

One takeaway for me is how important landscaping is to making a space beautiful.

theendisney3• 6 months ago

Im a professional cleaner, there is lots of wonderful looking design out there that is impossible to clean. There is also a huge difference in how quick it looks dirty. Some things are easy to clean but if you have to do it 3 times per day in stead of once a week its going to be needlessly expensive and still look dirty half the time.

gk1• 6 months ago

What are some striking examples from your experience?

BTW this is what I love most about HN - the surprising variety of people you can learn from, from billionaire founders to expat bingo-card geeks to Georgian-onion sellers to Dutch pro cleaners...

theendisney3• 6 months ago

On a Light surface tiny stains stick out, on a dark floor tiny flecks of dirt stick out as if under blacklight, a concrete color with some smudge patern may get extremely dirty without anyone noticing it (which might also not be what you want) a dark floor with a pattern of tiny white dots can also look very clean while dirty.

Any porous material is a terrible idea, you get lots of surface area that you cant reach. Carpet, curtains, upholstery.

Gaps between things should be big enough for how deep they are. Tiny legs under sofas or closets are not useful for anything. Adjust the size of the gaps between wall panels to your favorite kind of insect or rodent.

The funniest one i've seen was a city with a lot of mosquitos where someone put giant neon letters outside under a roof. In a few days it was completely covered in highly active spider turf war dens enough to make a grown man scream. Apparently spiders love roofs and they obviously know flies like light.

atum47• 6 months ago

I spent years doing that post processing on Photoshop, trying to increase realism on my archviz scenes, clients never went for it. They use to prefer the fake, perfect 3D look. Nice project, well done.

hahahahhaah2• 6 months ago

Render has 2 meanings here. Clever.

hahahahhaah2• 6 months ago

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)

evolve2k• 6 months ago

My city is car dependent and often no effort goes into making it more walkable.

Would love a version that renders a mix of cars and trucks onto any roads, to show up how crap the experience would actually be out front of road facing building.

yieldcrv2• 6 months ago

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

yieldcrv2• 6 months ago

Could use this on all real estate and apartment listings

nkoren• 6 months ago

Recovering architect here. This made my night. Bravo, no notes!

phyzome• 6 months ago

This is one of the few instances of generative AI for images that I actually like.

MobiusHorizons• 6 months ago

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.

stackedinserter2• 6 months ago

Did someone try to connect output to the input for several iterations, to make it progressively more Poland?

MagicMoonlight• 6 months ago

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.

Gigachad• 6 months ago

To some extent they probably want to express that this is a render, rather than tricking people in to thinking it’s a real photo.

jinushaun• 6 months ago

This reminds me of “emo” music. All the emotions except happiness. These renders are depressing.

itishappy2• 6 months ago

Huh. I kinda like 'em. I've spent a good deal of time loitering in areas like this, of my own volition. Unsurprisingly, I tend to like emo music too. Maybe I'm a salmon, happiest fighting against the current.

forthwall• 6 months ago

Honestly this looks nicer than the previous image, it feels more real

bpavuk• 6 months ago

oh wow, the results are very Ukrainian... at least while we don't talk about places where Russia struck

qwertox• 6 months ago

Deserves an award.

amelius3• 6 months ago

This is what my brain does automatically when I see advertisements.

Anyway, if we used this anti-filter on social media then perhaps teens would not be so depressed.

raincole• 6 months ago

This is based on Nano Banana API. I wonder how much it costed the author as it reached HN frontpage. At least it seems like they set a quota though.

fhe• 6 months ago

i'd love to watch its rendering of any of the recent big budget sci-fi productions

krick• 6 months ago

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.

pcmaffey• 6 months ago

A filter for how it looks in 3+ years too would be nice.

mproud2• 6 months ago

Just insert random transformer boxes and manhole covers.

socalgal2• 6 months ago

I know several AAA game devs that would like this feature in their games. They're frustrated that their artists always want the screen to "POP!" and keep ratcheting up the contrast and saturation.

mrbluecoat• 6 months ago

Apply it to every scene in a random Wes Anderson movie and call it "Depression"

ahoka4• 6 months ago

Isn't that the plot for Grand Budapest Hotel?

owenpalmer• 6 months ago

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.

mindfang• 6 months ago

Doesn't seem to work on my machine. Getting 402s on free renders.

sensecall2• 6 months ago

Would love to know with insane service this uses in the background. Anyone know?

sensecall2• 6 months ago

* what image gen

DeathArrow• 6 months ago

Meanwhile, in Russia...

https://imgur.com/a/JdMDQPB

beklein2• 6 months ago

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" } } }

fdb• 6 months ago

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.

beklein2• 6 months ago

Thank you! Learned something new today. Will try to look out for this trick on other Lovable sites I will stumble upon.

wffurr2• 6 months ago

> 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.

RuslanL• 6 months ago

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.

littlecranky67• 6 months ago

Now if you can do the same for photos of women from dating profiles, you have a million dollar idea.

p0w3n3d• 6 months ago

Please rename to "Poland-render". This is how the architecture looks like in my country

materialpoint• 6 months ago

This should be compulsory for pitching architects and entrepreneurs. Prove that your design can withstand real weather and the washed out decay of time. Classical architecture withstands weathering and littering remarkably better. Architects are even using corrugated steel sheets intended for ugly shacks as the fascade of new buildings intended for people to live in. It couldn't be worse.

mopsi• 6 months ago

Not only architecture. I recently saw a dirty Cybertruck and it looked like a cheap prop from a 1980s sci-fi movie. Made me think about how well the average Toyota is designed that it manages to look good even on a cloudy day while covered in a layer of dirt.

SoftTalker2• 6 months ago

I wouldn't hold up Toyota as anything special. My old Toyota pickup looked like swiss cheese from all the rust. Have never seen a car rust so much as that one.

abyssin• 6 months ago

It baffles me that contemporary architects don’t seem to be aware of the existence of rain. Why put white render on the facade of your building if it turns to green within five years? Why the hate for large overhangs that would solve this problem for cheap?

y-curious2• 6 months ago

My wife worked at an in house architecture firm for a fancy brand. The amount of times design team wanted to “hide the top part of that wall because it looks too dark” is nauseating. They literally would make impossible buildings happen on design photos and then the higher ups would get mad when the building had walls…

_annum• 6 months ago

If corrugated metal were not associated with shacks, would it be so concerning? Most materials can look good with the right execution. The difference comes from form and detailing.

"Classical" architecture is (thankfully) dead and will never return. It's too costly and we lack the skilled labour force required. For those that nonetheless demand it, we get cheap imitations of classical details that look worse than a simpler but well-considered alternative.

There have been some promising advances in automated machine carving of stone, but it's still expensive. It has a bright future as part of a hybrid aesthetic enabled by contemporary technology. We need to look forward and not back.

sergiogjr• 6 months ago

Rename it to "Make it Soviet".

nfrankel• 6 months ago

As an architecture graduate who never worked in the field, I'm glad this allows to debunk the all bullshits of fame-driven architects.

wateralien10• 6 months ago

I would love to see a gallery on this site too.

agumonkey2• 6 months ago

Architecture contests should be done with these

Arn_Thor• 6 months ago

It’s funny but it’s still AI slop. It also loves to add electrical boxes everywhere

aembleton2• 6 months ago

Thats what happens where I live when each random fibre network wants to add boxes.

supernes• 6 months ago

Alternative branding idea: eastern-europify.ai

usrusr3• 6 months ago

Pretty much what has long been my dream "make the world better" product (long as in from pre-genAI days), only that this one happens in image space: take an architectural model, look at the surface material specifications, analyze it for where rainwater would run down etc and generate weathering texture, how would this look when it's not new anymore.

Because as I see it, a lot of aesthetic decisions in architecture, pretty much anything that goes in the direction of minimalism, is just putting "newness" in the center of perception. And thus absence of "newness" will be in the center of perception when it stops being new. All these clear geometric shapes? They look awesome at the opening ceremony, but two years down the line they are like magnifying glasses for uneven changes in color and the like. Whereas for a more playful surface full of ornaments, those same years would be hardly more than a blink and they can age gracefully, on the aesthetic level (and on the technical level, required maintenance intervals are much longer anyways). Architects who claim to care for sustainability should demonstrate that they consider how the building will look like later in life.

larusso3• 6 months ago

I see this as well with huge modern buildings with wood parts. They look great the first year. The wood shines red’ish. After a winter the wood part starts to grey out. I understand that this is sometimes a look they strife for but all the preview renders show it in the prestige condition. Nobody is doing a yearly training. And don’t get me started on all the glass survives for elevators, roofs, bus stops, divider panels next to tram stops (I’m mainly meaning Berlin here) which nobody cares to clean or is so difficult to clean that after 2 or 3 years it looks very run down.

Joel_Mckay4• 6 months ago

Some see a patina with weathered surfaces as desirable.

The beauty of Kintsugi can also be difficult for people to understand. =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9LMKGte0UU

SilasX• 6 months ago

Reminds me of how the Statue of Liberty went from being brownish gold to green:

https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/u22v09/t...

ReptileMan• 6 months ago

Most of the mega projects are in authoritarian states. So in a way it is about the photo op at opening. And then the next mega project.

amelius3• 6 months ago

That's maybe nice for prestige projects but imho the main problem in architecture is projects on a budget and how money is allocated. There should be a law that says that X% of the building costs should be in the facade, the part that everybody sees. That alone should help a lot in making cities look nicer.

dahart2• 6 months ago

That sounds like a recipe for skimping on safety and design systemically. No thank you. You can’t legislate aesthetics, and there’s already a huge incentive to make buildings look great. People already spend a lopsided amount on the facade making it look better than it is, rather than spending on where they should: foundation, structure, good design, and longevity. In my city, apartment buildings used to require steel structures and lawmakers relaxed the requirement so they went back to wood because it’s cheaper. Now the new ones look great but they’re burning down and falling apart at higher rates than before.

Aurornis• 6 months ago

There should be a law that says that X% of the building costs should be in the facade

Cities solve this with design requirements and through the approval process. Specifying a minimum spend isn’t going to make the buildings look nice by itself. You’d just get weird budget games being played.

Cities with restrictive planning commissions can push buildings toward certain looks. People get angry about it, though, because it gets harder and more expensive to build things in an era where it’s already too expensive to build.

fnord77• 6 months ago

this is what gets me about brutalism. Concrete looks nice when brand new, but a few years of acid rain makes it look like dog shit

usrusr3• 6 months ago

Some of my favorite examples of graceful aging in architecture are concrete - but those are never the ones that celebrate efficiency, they always have some playful element that will still be playful when the newness has faded. Ribbed concrete (if you don't know what that means: worth googling!) alternating with smooth surface for example. But sure, once the structure reaches a certain size threshold, you better play the "glass & steel" card a lot, it has been dominant for almost a century for a reason. But even that can be overdone and concrete exposing aging can be a nice contrast.

Analemma_2• 6 months ago

You can do regular maintenance on concrete to keep it looking nice, but nobody wants to spend the money. Everyone understands that a wooden house exterior has to be repainted now and then, but thinks "concrete = no upkeep costs". Architects have complained bitterly about this for a while; I don't love brutalism but I can sort of see their point.

boobsbr• 6 months ago

Apparently Brussels is depressing enough in winter for the AI to only remove pedestrians, everything else is the same.

rcarmo• 6 months ago

This is lovely. Having architects in my extended family I'm going to have a field day with it :)

ArekDymalski• 6 months ago

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

mmaunder• 6 months ago

Seems like their api is broken. Probably overloaded

imdsm• 6 months ago

And it's broken

everyone• 6 months ago

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.

stared• 6 months ago

As someone living in Central-Eastern Europe, I approve. Finally, stripping away that Disney saccharine and making things real and familiar.

In Polish, we actually have a new word for this: marcopad. It’s a portmanteau of March (marzec) and November (listopad). It describes this cold, rainy weather perfectly: no leaves, no snow, just dirt. It's generally depressing and really makes you think about global warming from December to February.

thisisauserid• 6 months ago

Need this in AR to un-Dubai everything.

20 years ago buildings never turned out like their renderings promised but now they do.

jebarker• 6 months ago

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

DrBazza• 6 months ago

It's just missing the inevitable 'desire paths' that are the routes that people really want to walk, not some wibbly wobbly path that a junior planner drew.

boca_honey• 6 months ago

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.

MagnusHambleton2• 6 months ago

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!

PTOB• 6 months ago

As someone who has done architectural renderings for fun and profit, I highly approve of this. The greatest downfall of our contemporary "built environment," as folks call it, is how poorly modern materials age and weather.

LeoPanthera• 6 months ago

Oops, looks like we hugged it to death.

mikae1• 6 months ago

Edge Function returned a non-2xx status code

amai• 6 months ago

Has anyone found images which are unchanged by the filter?

Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings

Related Stories