We Used to Render Overnight and Hope for the Best

We don’t usually open with a personal anecdote, but bear with us on this one.

Last week I came across a BBC documentary from 1998 on YouTube, following two families buying their first home computer.

The excitement.
The confusion.
The huge monitors.
The complete uncertainty about what these machines were actually for, or what they might one day be able to do.

1998 is also the year Dan and I started Blink Image. (I know, right!?)

Watching it was strange, because it took me straight back to the way we were working at the time.

We took out a significant loan to buy a single workstation. One computer, shared between two people. The software couldn’t render reflections — the processing power simply wasn’t there.

To produce one image, we would set it rendering at the end of the day, go home, and hope it had finished by the following morning. Hope it hadn’t crashed. Hope we hadn’t missed something obvious.

For reference material — people, cars, trees — we were scanning magazine clippings (no Google Image Search), shooting slides on film cameras, and cutting figures out by hand to drop into scenes.

We even ran a small sideline selling CD-ROMs of cut-out people, plants and cars to architects who needed the same thing. (Some readers might still be using them!)

The craft existed.

The tools were brutal.

It is easy to treat that as nostalgia. But the more interesting point is how much the available toolkit has changed while many visual briefs have barely moved.

The Leaps That Changed Everything

Not every development over the past 27 years moved the needle equally.

Some things were incremental. A handful were genuinely transformative.

Global illumination was one.

Before it, CGI lighting could look technically competent but somehow flat. You could tell something was off, even if you couldn’t say exactly what.

Global illumination introduced the subtle, bounced quality of real light: the way it softens under overhangs, reflects off floors, quietly fills corners. Suddenly images started to feel less like illustrations and more like places.

Digital photography changed the workflow completely.

Our first professional digital camera cost well over £1,000. The memory card cost another £1,000 (for 1GB!). The resolution was somewhere between 2 and 4 megapixels, which at the time felt extraordinary. The batteries (double-A x 4) seemed to last about 30 minutes I seem to recall!

But the important thing was immediacy.

We could shoot reference material and have it straight away. No film. No developing. No scanning.

A 360-degree lens attachment opened up something else entirely: early virtual tours of existing buildings, stitched from photographs. Something previously impossible to offer was suddenly part of the toolkit.

GPU rendering changed the economics of production.

Before it, a single high-quality image could mean a full day’s processing — or networking several machines together to share the load, a setup we ran for a while that felt improbably complicated for the results it produced.

GPU rendering brought that down dramatically. What might once have run overnight could be produced in roughly an hour on a single machine.

That changed iteration. It changed ambition. It changed what could realistically be offered within a commercial project.

Animation, previously almost prohibitively slow at 25 frames per second, began to become achievable.

Not easy.

But achievable.

The internet changed almost everything else.

Dial-up gave way to always-on. Research became instant. Image libraries became accessible. Online forums meant a problem that might once have taken weeks to solve could be answered in hours.

And eventually, it made it possible to run a studio without a fixed base — something we now do every day through Zoom, Google Workspace and a fully remote workflow.

Where Things Are Now

The current toolkit would have been genuinely unimaginable in 1998.

Real-time rendering means views, materials and light can be tested far more quickly. AI assists with enhancements, style exploration and quality refinements — powerful, though still dependent on rigorous underlying work.

Gaussian Splatting is opening up new ways to build interactive 3D environments from photographic capture, allowing existing spaces to be explored on a phone or computer without specialist hardware.

Animation is more accessible than it has ever been. VR has surfaced and retreated several times over the years, but wireless headsets are now genuinely useful in the right client presentations.

The point is not that every project needs all of this.

Most do not.

The point is that these tools now exist, they work, and they allow a development to be communicated in far more ways than a single static image.

A CGI can still be the right answer.

But it is no longer the only answer.

What This Means for You

This is the part that is actually worth pausing on.

The gap between what is technically possible and what many developers are currently commissioning is wider than it has ever been.

For a long time, the ceiling was low enough that a CGI for a brochure was roughly what the technology could deliver.

That ceiling has gone.

The budget conversation that once ended with a single static render can now open up a much wider range of options: an animated flythrough, an interactive capture of an existing building, a VR-ready presentation model, a teaser film, or a series of stills designed to work across planning, marketing, investment and consultation.

Not all of those are right for every scheme.

But they are available.

And the developers using them are often telling a fundamentally different story about their projects from those who are not.

The brief has not changed in 27 years:

Make someone believe in something that does not yet exist.

The tools available to do that have never been more powerful.

The question is no longer whether the technology can support a richer story.

It can.

The question is whether the brief asks enough of it.

If you would like to talk through what is now possible for an upcoming scheme — before the brief is written — we would be glad to have that conversation.

[email protected]
07777 146 495