Rendervous

An architectural visualization studio: architects upload their 3D design (SketchUp viewport, clay render, or any exported view) and Rendervous turns it into a photorealistic visualization — without redesigning it.

Your design, photorealistically visualized — not redesigned.

The design is the source of truth. Geometry is preserved; materials, lighting, environment and atmosphere are rendered. No prompts, no text-to-image — this is not a Stable Diffusion WebUI clone, it is a render tool.

Features

• Import → Render → Revise → Compare workflow, modeled after archviz tools (V-Ray / Enscape inspired, not copied)
• Canvas-first studio: left rail holds projects & views (designs), the center canvas shows the design vs. the latest render with a drag-to-compare divider, the right panel holds Visualize controls, and the bottom filmstrip holds revisions
• Architectural controls only: Style (Photoreal / Editorial / Minimal / Atmospheric), Lighting (Daylight / Overcast / Golden hour / Sunset / Night), Materials (As designed / Concrete / Wood / Stone / Custom), Environment (None / Tropical / Urban / Forest / Custom), Geometry fidelity slider (STRICT ↔ CREATIVE), plus an optional "what should change" natural-language note
• Advanced lighting & camera configs: sun direction (azimuth) and sun elevation (overrides the preset), focal length and aperture (F-stop) — tuned to feel like a real shoot, not a prompt
• Geometry-preserving prompt template (server/prompts.json): the reference is authoritative — geometry and camera are immutable, only appearance changes
• Revision workflow: every render is a revision of the imported design — click to make current, branch from any revision, select two to compare side-by-side, delete
• Bring-your-own-key: paste your OpenRouter API key in the header (stored in this browser only, sent per-request as X-OpenRouter-Key; falls back to server env OPENROUTER_API_KEY). Never persisted server-side.
• Render engine selection: pick any OpenRouter image model (e.g. google/gemini-2.5-flash-image recommended) with per-image price shown

Stack

• Frontend: Vite + React + TypeScript, hand-written dark studio theme (no UI framework)
• Backend: FastAPI (Python), SQLite (stdlib sqlite3), Pillow, requests — a background worker thread consumes a job queue and calls OpenRouter

Deliberately not MVP: no PostgreSQL, no object storage, no external job system — SQLite + local disk + an in-process worker thread are simpler and sufficient for a single instance.

Run

# 1. Backend
python3 -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
.venv/bin/uvicorn server.main:app --port 8000

# 2. Frontend (new terminal)
npm install
npm run dev        # http://localhost:5173

Then paste your OpenRouter API key into the header bar (or set OPENROUTER_API_KEY on the server — curl localhost:8000/api/health shows key_configured).

Run with Docker

# frontend only — the backend has no host port, it's reachable
# on the compose network via the nginx proxy
FRONTEND_PORT=8080 docker compose up --build

• Brings its own key: paste it in the header bar; the optional OPENROUTER_API_KEY env var is only a fallback.
• ./data is bind-mounted into the backend container, so projects/views/revisions/images survive restarts.
• Only the frontend is host-exposed (FRONTEND_PORT, default 8080); the backend is reachable only on the compose network.
• The frontend container is nginx serving the built assets and reverse-proxying /api + /images to the backend; the backend starts first (healthcheck-gated).

API (summary)

Endpoint	Purpose
GET /api/health	{ok, key_configured}
GET /api/models	image-capable OpenRouter models, price included, from the bundled static catalog (server/models_catalog.json, refreshed off-band by scripts/refresh_models.py)
POST /api/generate	start a render job; settings auto-builds the architectural prompt; design_id picks the reference image, visualization_id/parent_revision_id chain revisions
GET /api/jobs/{id}	job status (queued/running/done/failed), image_url, error
GET /api/projects	list projects
POST /api/projects	create a project
GET /api/projects/{id}	full tree: designs → visualizations → revisions
PATCH /api/projects/{id}	rename a project
POST /api/projects/{id}/archive · DELETE /api/projects/{id}	archive / delete a project
POST /api/projects/{id}/designs	multipart upload of a design reference image
POST /api/visualizations	create a visualization with settings
POST /api/designs/{id}/archive · DELETE /api/designs/{id}	archive / delete a design
POST /api/revisions/{id}/restore · DELETE /api/revisions/{id}	revision management

Auth: pass api_key in the body or X-OpenRouter-Key header; falls back to OPENROUTER_API_KEY env.

Data model

Project → Designs (views/camera angles) → Visualizations → Revisions (parent_revision_id = branch)
                                                        └── Jobs (queued/running/done/failed)

Files on disk under data/images/, SQLite under data/rendervous.db, prompt template in server/prompts.json (configurable, not hardcoded).