A 3D 360 panorama is a spherical, fully rendered view of a space that a visitor can pan, tilt, and zoom from a browser. No headset, no install, no plugin. It sits on a property listing, a developer’s pitch deck, or a showroom microsite, and it does one job well: it puts a remote viewer inside a room before that room physically exists or before they fly out to see it.
We build these from CAD drawings and reference material rather than from on-site photography. That distinction matters. Photographers shoot what’s there. We render what will be there — the finished apartment, the staged hotel suite, the showroom that hasn’t been fitted out yet. Most of our 360 work is pre-construction, which is exactly when developers need to be selling.
What a 3D 360 panorama actually does for a sale
A still render gives a buyer one angle. A walkthrough animation gives them a path the director chose. A 360 panorama gives them the room — they look where they want to look. For an off-plan apartment or a hotel still under fit-out, that shift in agency matters more than most marketing teams expect. The viewer stops being a spectator and starts inspecting the space the way they’d inspect it on a site visit.
Most investors won’t spend an hour decoding elevations and sections. They will spend three minutes spinning around a living room. That’s the practical case for the format.
Common uses we deliver against:
- Off-plan residential. Developers selling apartments or houses that don’t exist yet, embedded in the listing page.
- Hospitality marketing. Hotel suites, restaurant interiors, spa areas — places people want to feel before they book.
- Showrooms and retail concepts. Brand environments and flagship-store concepts presented to head office or franchisees.
- Investor and stakeholder presentations. A mixed-use scheme presented as a tour rather than as a slide pack.
- Sales centers. Touchscreen kiosks at on-site sales offices where prospective buyers can step into the unit they’re considering.
How we build a 3D 360 panorama from your drawings
The starting point is whatever you have. Ideally a Revit or AutoCAD set, plus a material direction and reference imagery for finishes. Hand sketches and photos of comparable interiors also work. We model the space in 3ds Max, set materials and lighting in Corona Renderer, and render the panoramas as high-resolution spherical maps.
What we typically need from a client to start:
- Floor plans and elevations (Revit, DWG, or PDF).
- A material and finish direction — moodboards, supplier links, or named products.
- Furniture and fixture references where they’re locked.
- The list of viewpoints you want (or trust us to propose them).
- Brand assets if the tour shell will carry your identity.
Each viewpoint becomes a rendered panorama. From there, we stitch viewpoints together into a connected tour with hotspots that move the visitor from one room to the next. The whole thing runs as HTML5 and works on desktop, tablet, and phone without anything to install. For clients who need a more bespoke front-end, we deliver tours inside a custom Three.js shell — branded UI, custom hotspot styles, embedded floor plan, language toggles, lead-capture overlays. That side of the work draws on the same WebGL practice we use for interactive product configurators and architectural visualizers.
Why a 3D 360 panorama earns its keep next to renders and animation
Renders, animations, and panoramas aren’t competing — they cover different ground. We deliver all three and often combine them on the same project. The honest comparison:
- Still renders are the hero shots. They’re what goes on the brochure cover and the website hero. Fastest to produce, easiest to art-direct.
- Animation is a guided story. You control pacing, music, and what the camera reveals. Best for marketing campaigns and investor decks where mood matters.
- 3D 360 panoramas are the inspection tool. They invite the viewer to look at the corners, the ceiling, the kitchen detail nobody else thought to feature.
For a developer pitching off-plan apartments, a 360 tour often answers questions that a drawing package cannot. How does the light fall in the living room. How much wall is there to the left of the TV. What does it feel like standing in the kitchen. None of that gets resolved by a floor plan, however well drawn.
Deliverables and file formats
What you actually receive at the end of a typical 3D 360 panorama project:
- High-resolution equirectangular panorama images (JPG, typically 8K–16K depending on viewing context).
- A packaged HTML5 virtual tour — a folder you upload to your own server or hand to your web team.
- An embed snippet (iframe or script) for dropping the tour into an existing CMS page.
- For Three.js-based tours: source files for the custom front-end so your developers can extend it later.
- Source render frames where the contract calls for it.
The tour itself is CMS-agnostic. WordPress, Webflow, a custom property portal, a Squarespace listing — all fine. Mobile viewing is part of the default delivery, not an upsell.
A reasonable scope conversation
360 tours scale in ways that aren’t always obvious from a brief. The variables that drive cost and timeline:
- Number of viewpoints. A single show apartment might be five rooms. A masterplan tour with amenities, lobby, gym, pool, and three unit types might be twenty-plus.
- Whether viewpoints connect into one tour. Five disconnected panoramas is a different job from a five-room tour with hotspot navigation, floor plan map, and unit-type switcher.
- UI customization. Default tour shell versus branded custom Three.js front-end.
- Interactive layers. Material swaps, day/night toggles, embedded videos, info popups, language switches, lead-capture forms.
- Sound and ambient layers. Optional but increasingly common for hospitality projects.
Worth being concrete about what changes when scope grows. A single-room 360 panorama with a default tour shell is a tight, focused job. A twenty-point tour with a custom branded UI, embedded floor-plan navigation, material-swap interactions on the kitchen, day/night lighting toggle, and a lead-capture overlay is a different kind of project — closer to a custom WebGL app than to a panorama package. Both are useful. The wrong call is to brief one and budget for the other.
We’ll usually push back if the brief is twenty viewpoints when five would land the sale, or if there are five when the scheme genuinely needs fifteen to explain the spatial relationships. Serious projects always have some change orders, but viewpoint count is one of the few variables worth locking down before render starts. Re-rendering a panorama because the viewpoint moved two meters is expensive in a way that re-rendering a still isn’t.
Where this fits in the wider service set
360 panoramas sit inside a broader visualization practice — over 2 decades of work and 1,500+ projects across architectural rendering, animation, product CGI, and interactive 3D. The same modeling and lighting that produces a brochure render produces a panorama. The same Three.js practice that builds a product configurator builds a custom tour shell. That continuity matters when a project needs more than one deliverable — and most serious property and showroom projects do.
If you’re weighing whether a tour, an architectural animation, or a set of stills is the right call for a specific project, the honest answer is usually “more than one of those, in a particular order.” We’re happy to talk through that before you commit. The same logic shows up on the builders and real estate agency sides of the practice, where the deliverable mix is driven by the buyer’s decision moment, not by what’s easiest to produce.