Solo founder of RenderMe, an AI-powered ArchiViz platform that renders and edits architectural and interior designs in seconds while preserving the original geometry and creative intent

All right. Hi, Intisar. How are you doing today? Hi, Mark. Yeah, I'm good, doing good. How are you? I'm doing good. I'm doing good. Thank you. So yeah, it's nice to connect with you. Thanks for taking the time to hop on a call and use the Hiree network and take a few minutes to talk about what you're doing with your new product and with OutThere with AI agents. So I'm Mark. I've worked in Hiree for a number of years now, and I'm really excited about this new project that we have where we're helping people connect on kind of the world's first truly AI agent forward social network. So yeah, why don't you give me an intro about yourself and talk a little bit about your product? Sounds great. And first of all, thank you for the opportunity. So I am Intisar. I finished my master's in computer science and my major or my thesis was on AI. And I was like since my early education, like even like 10 years ago while in my bachelor's, I was always tinkering with newer technologies like back then virtual reality and augmented reality was the next big thing. But then AI came over and due to my long professional career in the digital media industry, like alongside my computer science studies, I was working actively in various production companies making animation, TV series, or working in short films, music videos, whatnot. I have to do a lot of art, artviz, like architecture visualizations as part of that process. I worked in several mega projects too, like architectural projects. And what I suffered during those like 10 years of career is that rendering times have never become faster. Yes, it has been, it's faster than before. It has become more photorealistic if you are using the traditional rendering systems that are available. But then comes the issue of having a very powerful computer or a graphics card to be able to do that. So I wanted to, like it started as a personal project in the beginning. It was mostly to make my work easier. I thought, why not use AI to take off that rendering workload? And we, nowadays we see like AI has become, I would say, a negative aspect for like expert or professional designers because they call it AI smog, where you lose much of the creative decision-making and your, I would say, your creative direction when AI takes over what you are doing. So I wanted to avoid that too. So I wanted to keep the creator in the process and AI just becomes a co-worker or a helper tool that fasten up some of that, that I said, or that takes away the barriers to a good render. Like you don't need a strong enough graphics card or a GPU or a very expensive hardware to get professional results anymore. So that's why I built RenderMe combining all my experiences. So this is the tool made for architectural artists by an architectural artist who actually worked in the field. So I knew much of the headaches and much of the issues that we face, and so I solved it myself. So if I can maybe share my screen and show you a live demo. So once you, this is the landing page where you see the features, you see some comparisons of before and after you render with RenderMe. And I am, it's not just a rendering tool. As I said, it's an all-in-one ArchiViz tool, which helps students, architects, and interior designers to streamline their workflow and work faster and get better results for their clients or for their teachers or for their classrooms. So there's a long list of features, and some of them are very unique that currently I have not seen any tool provide that. So that I'm quite proud about. So once we are in the studio, this is the interface that you are presented with. It's quite intuitive and you see in the top nav bar, you have four workflows. You can either render, you can edit in canvas, you can use the interior 3D for actual browser-based 3D designs. So you don't have to leave the software and, you know, use other paid tools. And this full studio is completely free forever for you to use. So the credits that you see in the top right corner is only deducted when you use AI for rendering or for video generation. Otherwise, like the full design studio and the 3D workflows are completely free online. So I think that will take away much of the entry barriers for students or interior designers who doesn't have a very expensive subscription plan. So just to see, show you. So for example, a very simple workflow could be you have a SketchUp design. SketchUp is widely used by architecture students. And you have very simple, you don't have to prompt, you don't have to do any headaches. So there's very simple presets and I'll just leave it at default and I'll press generate render. And as we are talking live within five to 10 seconds, you should have a very finished complete result. So just a couple more seconds. And do you have your own server processing this or which cloud or did you set up your own database? Yes, it's completely set up by me and it's secure and it's cloud-based. And yes, as you can see, so another thing with current AI models, like even with frontier AI models like Nanoganana or GPT image 2, what most users face is the geometries are changed. The composition is changed. The camera view might change. The objects in your scene might change. But my custom workflow that I designed stays true to your geometry. As you can see, like every detail remains the same and it's very high resolution also. It's like 2K resolution. So and then you can export, but I also have some unique, like you can chat to edit on the right corner. You can tell RenderMate what to change. Like I'll say, change the swimming pool into a kid's playground. And just like that, by chatting, you can make changes and you don't have to leave the site or make smaller edits. And also, which is, I think, much more usable, like which makes this a complete Archviz tool is my, so as you can see, the swimming pool is now a kid's playground. So it added playground elements into the existing image. But for example, I'll show you another workflow where I have, can you see my screen? Like I have SketchUp here. Yeah. Yeah, so it's a interior design. Design in SketchUp. And here in extension, this is also free. Like you can download it from our website. You can download a free plugin for SketchUp or Blender or ArchiCAD. And I just press, if I go here and go to capture mode on our app and it says like open SketchUp. So it automatically detects that SketchUp is open and I send you to RenderMate. And you can see the SketchUp model has come to our online app. And now I can just press, for example, now I'll change it to full interior and change it to interior and generate render. Yeah, so as I said, full interior, you see it has become a very photorealistic image of a very cool and very bluish interior, keeping all my elements in the image intact exactly as it is. Now, one more feature we have is in paint where, for example, if I want to only edit this part, I can say change the sofa to a red chair. So here you don't need to go to Photoshop or whatever. And also you don't have to be worried about changing your whole geometry, which sometimes happens with traditional AI workflows. You tell ChatGPT or as you can see before and after. So there's a lot you can do just in this render tab. And then, for example,

If you want to make some changes to the source image, you can just go to canvas and make your edits, just like Photoshop, and everything happens on the cloud. So for example, I select this, like Photoshop, and I can change the materials. I'm just playing around here. So and I can edit each material, and then I can just go back to render tab and then render a new scene using this as a source image. The canvas tool has everything that you might need from drawing tools to paint brushes to everything you might need to fix your stuff before you go to the render, final render, so that you don't need Canva or Photoshop or any other design tools. Now, if you switch to interior 3D, we already see a demo, but you can edit the floor plan. And one of the most unique things we have here is this is all free to use. We are not using up the credits anymore. So I press import floor plan. Here you can see I have a hand-drawn floor plan here, which is completely just an image file. And as I say, import and replace. What it does is instantaneously. This is also happening with my own computer vision model that I trained that it converts your floor plan into an editable template. And now if you go to 3D view, here your floor plan is ready to make your own designs on the web. So, and I have now seen any tool that allows you to import hand-drawn images. And this could be very like, and you can add more walls or add doors and windows. For example, here I want to add a door. And now you have a door here or a window. Or you can also change the wall materials exactly like in the canvas. You can make it a stone wall or you can change the floor material to like grass, for example. So we have a huge library of materials that you can use and then edit each material however you wish and place furniture. You can also import your own 3D models into the web and place them. So we have a built-in library for you to play around with, but you can also import your own 3D furniture or like any other, like a character or a human being, and then place it live. And then once you are happy, you can go to render and just render this out. So it's that easy. It's very fast. And all new users get free credits when they sign up. And there's also a referral program. You can see now it's rendered into a realistic image once you're done with your 3D design. So yeah, and the video is like most AI users are currently already familiar with how video generation works. You have presets for camera motion or aspect ratio and resolution. And then you generate video. And this also happens all on the... And also we have a free upscale to 4K. So once the video generates maybe 720p or 1080p, you can upscale it to 4K resolution for free. So there's a lot of free features in the studio that I think architectural students and like professional architects or even studios will benefit from. And we have a full history generation that keeps your metadata saved. So just a minute. Yeah. As you can see, when we click on a history, we maybe I'll open an old one. So this is an old generation saved. And I can see what exact settings I used to generate this. So there's always a consistency. I don't have to play around, experiment and hope that I get similar results. I can just follow the settings that I previously used and then I will get the same results, basically. So these are my strengths. I mostly focused on keeping the architectural process intact. So the human part stays unchanged. You still have to design your own models and you have complete creative control over the results you see. And AI just makes the process of rendering faster. So you don't have to wait four hours just to see if the lighting change is okay or maybe your client has a sudden idea that, okay, change the swimming pool and then you work a week to change the swimming pool. So all of these processes can be helped and facilitated with a good AI workflow. Thank you. So that's the demo of the app. That's awesome, man. That's crazy. You were able to add all those features and like you built kind of, to me, it appears like a tool that's just like an awesome multi-tool for all types of people that are architectural students or interested in design. And you've kind of like, and you, did you, you studied architecture? Is that kind of what your inspiration was for like for making a tool for this type of person? Go ahead. Yeah, well, I come from a family of artists. My dad was an architect, but I myself studied computer science. So I had an early exposure to architecture and design due to my family background. But then, as I said, I have worked due to working in the 3D space. I have also worked in animated TV shows as a lead compositor. So working with all these 3D tools, I had several architectural projects that came under me. And I had to, I over my long career of 10 years, I have worked on probably 50 or more architectural projects where I had to do exactly the same thing that I'm showing you, but without AI. So each render or each architectural, I have worked on like mega projects like transport systems and then whole city generation and then even smaller projects like Expo and stall designs. And all those experiences, I faced the same issue of having to wait two hours overnight for just a simple lighting change or a material has been changed and I now have to render it again. Here you can just, as I showed, you can just fix a simple item within seconds. And yeah, so that motivated me and I'm thankful that nowadays we live in an age where it's really possible. And of course, this is a tool that has been very meticulously planned. And I knew for sure the challenges that a designer might face with AI, which is still present with current frontier models. And I'm not using GPT or Nanobanana in the backend because it's much cheaper than them because like even if you run out of free tokens, free credits, you can just buy $5 starter packs instead of like a monthly subscription. So you don't have to commit. You want more generations. You can buy one time packs and it gives you hundreds of renders for very cheap. And also, as I keep constantly saying, the biggest challenge is keeping true to your own composition, your own design without changing what you made in your 3D software. Yeah, I mean, yeah, when you're trying to use AI to edit things, it really does kind of take a lot of artistic liberty, right? So that is a really big difficulty. I think if you're an artist and you're trying to maintain the integrity of whatever it is you are, you're trying to design or bring to the world. Yes, exactly. Thank you for making it. Yeah, thank you for summarizing what I'm trying to do there. Of course. So where do you see, do you have like additional modifications you're planning to make to this? Or do you have like a kind of a vision for like a roadmap for the product going forward or how would you like to see your product grow? Yeah, yeah. So definitely. Right now we currently have three plugins to connect with SketchUp, Blender and ArchiCAD. So I first, I targeted the mostly common softwares that 3D designers use. And we connect to them, but there's a lot more to, for example, 3D Max and then Revit. So or AutoCAD. So all these softwares we would like to connect with. So we are currently developing the plugins to connect with them.

that you can instantaneously transfer your design into our web app without having to install anything or yeah, without like this software, there is no installation, it's completely web-based. So that we are planning, so we have a roadmap for Revit and other softwares. And then later, I would like to build a full 3D designer itself. So right now, the interior 3D that we have, it's perfect for interior designs, as you can see in the demo, but we would like to make it, but of course, there are challenges because this is a complete 3D rendering running in your browser and running in the cloud. So obviously, it has some bottlenecks that we are trying to address to make it, to optimize it and make it be able to make large scale projects. But those are like challenges we will try to tackle in the future. But currently, I think this, the interior designer itself is pretty robust. And as I said, one more thing I might have forgot that once you generate a floor plan from your hand-drawn images, you can also export it to DXF, and then you can further edit it in your own 3D software. So no 3D software currently like SketchUp or ArchiCAD allows you to import a hand-drawn image and then converts it into an editable file. But our web app can also just work as a bridge, which is completely free. So yes, there are, as I said, expansion plans, but maybe in another six months, we hope to bring more changes to the app. Yeah, the, I mean, those sound like pretty big, you have like a pretty detailed roadmap of, I think, of like different products you want to connect it to and ways to kind of improve it and bring it out to the world to make it more useful or more, give it more utility to people that are focused on design. Do you have like, so who do you think this product would fit very well with? Like with like what type of people, like, okay, obviously architecture students, what other types of people do you think would be your ideal market for this? Yeah, first bracket is of course architecture. Anyone relevant to or related to architecture, even big farms, like architectural design farms, it is super useful to them. And then of course, the traditional designers, because although we predominantly connect to architectural softwares like SketchUp, Blender, but Blender also, like people are making full feature length movies in Blender. And this could also be useful to them. Like people in the creative arts media who makes short films or music videos, they can, without, so without, even Blender takes a long time to render. So if they want quick iterations, like the Blender artists, they want to see, okay, what if I use this material or this colors, color tone, or this kind of lighting, they can iterate pretty fast on this web app and then they go back to the traditional Blender rendering workflow. So this is also useful for other sorts of artists, AI artists, because we have this upload function where you can possibly, just for an example, maybe I can show you, like a hand-drawn cartoon. I mean, of course, we always promote to use non-copyrighted stuff, but this is just an example. So, and then if I upload that image, so this is, and I use both realistic, I will say maybe night interior or dusk ambient, and I will call it landscape. And then I generate render. Yeah, so as I said, it's Now you can see. Can you see how, so it kept the, so even with like, as I said, like frontier AI models, there might be changes to the actual input source that you provide the AI model, which you don't want. But here, as you can see, even the rock behind her, the shape of it is completely preserved. The, what you call this algae, like the plants, the plants itself gives their shape and the skin tones, everything remains the same. And so yeah, it has massive use. Like the same workflow can apply to all kinds of AI artists just because of the custom workflow that I designed using multiple models and Loras. Yeah. That's awesome. That is really the fidelity in which it's able to capture details and just like really even bring out like very small details in the original art. Like that algae plant in the back, that's kind of that's kind of faded the way it can kind of just bring that to life is crazy. Well, awesome. Yeah, go ahead, go ahead. I'm glad I could test this out in front of you because I have not really tried it with outside the architectural domain. But this can now that you see the capability of it, it can be useful in also game art design, like for game designers, just to all, to all, to, you know, have a very rough layout and then generate concept arts for games, like finished results so that you can quickly get a better idea of your, you can bring your idea out of your head and then have it visualized. So yeah. That's that's amazing. No, this is really, this is really, really cool. It's amazing you're able to do this on your own or you have a small team that's working on this or this is just you. You're a one-man army. No, it's um, it's just me. Yes. I mean, I, I started developing this while I was also developing uh another app with, it was a 3D app for phones uh with a full team. So that obviously helped because I mean, obviously none of them worked in on this project, but to have like to work with, because I'm a solo developer, but then you need to be mindful about the UI, the UX. And because I had, uh, I was working with a full team at that time, so many of those experiences at my previous job helped me design it better. And yes, it took months and months of bug fixing and I'm currently, I think it's six months in production now. But to, to be able to do this in six months, it couldn't be, It's unimaginable pre-AI era. So, so it, because I, so yeah, so I had, I, I use VS code for most of the coding, but then I have co-pilot, like GitHub co-pilot to help me. So yeah, it's millions of lines, I mean, hundreds of thousands of lines of code. And yes, I did it solo, but obviously I have several shipped apps on the Play Store and Mac App Store, iPhone App Store. So, so my previous experiences definitely helped. Yeah. Yeah, you know, it seems like you're this kind of product is natural given your, you know, your kind of background within. Within your family and within your previous work experiences. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm definitely gonna, I'm definitely gonna feature this on our website. We're gonna put this uh this interview on the Hiri AI website and then any artists that come into our that come into our network, hopefully they'll they'll find it. And as I'm talking with people who are kind of doing this interview series, I'll recommend it to anybody else doing any design projects and hopefully I can help kind of just set up some some some connections for you, you know, uh, that are that are useful, you know, or any partnerships or anything like that. Um, and aside from just like additional users, is there anybody else that you're like looking for to like collaborate with on this project or anything like that? Yeah, yeah, I have found several architectural-based influencers who are like on YouTube and TikTok. And I am in the process of emailing each of them, which is taking a long time.

to meet our creators. And so I am looking forward to because the creators are usually they are much experienced users of these AI sort of tools. And yeah, so I'm looking to collaborate with AI creators or like just architectural artists, but as you can see also like game designers and anyone in the AI art genre. Yeah, I'm looking to collaborate with them. And yeah, that's basically it. That's awesome. That is so cool. Yeah, I will, uh, yeah, so I'll keep that in mind as I'm kind of interviewing people and making new connections on our platform and everything like that. So if I can help set you up with any game designers, people that are interested in in AI development similar or focused on image generation or anything like that, I'll definitely send them your way and or at least just make an intro, you know, on the higher network. Thank you. Of course, you can even ask now. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I will. I will definitely. Now that I saw the secretary in action, I will definitely try it out to, you know, tell him to search for people in the same domain or, you know, connect with people. So that's a nice thing that you're doing. And one more thing, like, do we, do we need to record like a ending or goodbye message or anything? I'll edit this. I'll edit this. I'll edit this, but you can also make an outro. I'll edit this, but you can also make an outro and then I'll make an edit cut of this. And then if it, uh, if it fits within my algorithm, that makes the edit cuts and I'll add the outro there. So yeah, why don't you give a little outro? Yeah. Yeah, I am. Thank you, Max, for your time. And obviously, thank you to Highly platform to allow us to connect and collaborate with people of similar minds and maybe have have more exposure and have more, a better network for support. So, and thank you for your time. It was very nice talking to you about AI and innovation. Of course, man. Yeah, it was, it was so cool to see your product in action and kind of see what you're doing. I just, I can't believe you're able to, you were able to accomplish that in such a short amount of time with just basically on your own. It's really amazing that you were able to just improve, you know, from cookie cutter AI image generation into this product that can do renders, design, all of these things just on your, on yourself. So definitely you deserve kudos. That is, that is a, it's really an amazing product and I look forward to kind of following it and seeing what you do with it in the future. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. You have a nice day. You have a good one. All right, I'll turn it off. Yeah.

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