Family House With Atrium

"Absolute privacy, open horizons”

The Brief

When I began my freelance career, I wanted to dive into the archviz industry. Still not sure if it’s fully possible, but I’m working on it 🙂I was building my first reel, which was basically all spec work since I had no real projects under my belt at the time — summer 2025.

Anna Podoužková was kind enough to let me visualize her design for a family house. The building was never realized — it’s a very cool study she worked on together with Anna Nižňanská.

My goal was to respect their original visualization style, which is super cool and stylized, and try to bring it into 3D — then play with the visuals and animation there.

The Process

I got the design from Anna as a Datasmith export from Rhino — basic geometry. She also gave me some of her working cameras from the scene — cameras she creates during the design process to evaluate the space from important angles and perspectives.

A huge help for any visualization is also a presentation document with the study — information about the structure, furniture, decorations, and most importantly materials and color schemes.

For the distant environment, I needed hills with forests that look European — or even better, Czech-looking. Not as easy as I expected :) Most environments lean more exotic or American. I found Stone Pine Forest on FAB, which was close enough.

Other assets in the scene are a combination of FAB, CGTrader, and TurboSquid. I knew I wanted to create animation — a POV walkthrough and some simple linear moves through the scene — so I needed animated animals and animated people.

For people, I knew I wanted 4D humans from Chaos Anima, which I’ve used a couple of times on other projects. The animals are skeletal meshes again from FAB, ready for Unreal. And the birds in the distance are from the one and only Josh Toonen.

The Animation

I love showing architectural design from the perspective of a person — how it would feel to walk through the design before it’s built. I want the first-person experience but without VR, and I also want the animation fully under control — timing elements exactly when I want them in specific moments and compositions.

That’s why Unreal is perfect, especially with the Virtual Camera feature. So it’s basically me walking around my home with an iPad :) Then I clean up the animation, use additive transform tracks to guide it better, and keyframe elements and post-process effects.

For the linear camera move shots, these are very simple — with a slight handheld motion just to give the architectural design justice from more geometric views. But still with animated people, animals, moving trees, birds, etc., to make it feel more alive.

The Conclusion

Huge learning experience for me — learning how to communicate with an architect about their design, getting it into Unreal, set dressing, populating with characters, and animating cameras. Loved it! And big thanks to Anna for letting me use the design for my reel.

And now… I have to streamline the process to be more efficient… shit :)

Thanks for checking out the project!

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