What a 3D Walkthrough Actually Costs in the UK
Ask five studios what a 3D walkthrough costs and you get five versions of "it depends". That answer is true and useless. I run the walkthrough side of 100CGI Studio in London, mostly for office and fit-out work, and I can give you the actual 3D walkthrough cost in the UK, the number we put on a proposal, and the reasons it moves.
Here is the short version for office project tenders. We charge £2,500 for the setup and the first 60 seconds of 4K animation, then £1,000 for every additional 30 seconds. If the walkthrough is a standalone job we bill the 3D scene build separately. If it runs as part of a larger CGI project for the same space, the scene is free, because we are building that model anyway. That is the whole pricing model, and you can run the numbers yourself on our price list.
Why "per minute" is the wrong way to think about it
Most pricing guides quote a per-minute rate. In the UK you will see figures starting around £6,000 per minute and climbing past £20,000 for animation with characters and heavy effects. Cad Crowd and Media Village both land in that territory. Those numbers are not wrong, but they describe broadcast and product animation, not an office walkthrough, and the per-minute frame hides how the cost actually builds.
A walkthrough is front-loaded. The first ten seconds are not one-sixth the cost of a sixty-second film. Before a single final frame renders, we have built the 3D scene, set the camera language, lit the space and agreed the route. That work happens once whether the film is short or long. After that, extra seconds are cheaper, which is exactly why our model charges a setup-heavy first minute and a flat £1,000 per 30 seconds on top. A linear per-minute quote either overcharges you for a short film or undercharges and cuts corners on the build.
So when you compare quotes, ignore the per-minute sticker. Ask what is in the first number and what each extra block of time adds.
What a walkthrough should cost for an office
For office design projects, here is where real money lands. A tight single-floor fit-out reads well at 60 seconds, so it sits at the £2,500 base. A two-minute film for a larger scheme runs to roughly £5,500 on our model. That matches the affordable end of the wider market, where architectural walkthroughs of 90 seconds to two minutes are quoted at £2,500 to £5,000, and it undercuts the per-minute broadcast rates by a wide margin because we are not animating a car advert.
Length should follow the building, not your budget. The rule I use is about 60 seconds for every 500 square metres of office floor. A small office overstays its welcome at two minutes; a multi-floor headquarters needs the room to breathe. We set the exact runtime against your plan and send an estimate within 24 hours of seeing it, so the price is a number you can put in a budget, not a range.
What inflates the quote
A few things genuinely move the cost, and a few things should not.
Changes after the lighting stage are the big one. We build in a grey block-out pass specifically so you sign off camera and geometry before we apply materials. Swapping a floor finish at that point is free. Moving a wall after we have lit and started rendering is not, because it ripples through every shot. The fix is boring: lock the design at block-out.
Resolution and delivery count. A 4K master is our standard. If you need a stereoscopic VR build or a free-roam interactive version, that is a different production with its own cost, and most office pitches do not need it. Revision rounds matter too, though less than people fear, because frame-accurate review tools kill the endless email loop.
What should not inflate your quote is the 3D model, if you are already commissioning stills of the same space. Pairing a walkthrough with a set of renders is the most cost-effective package in this business, a point even the budget guides make. We go further and drop the scene charge entirely when the walkthrough is part of the wider project. Paying twice to build the same office is the kind of line item that tells you a studio is pricing by the menu, not by the job.
A worked example
Numbers help more than ranges, so here are two real shapes of job on our model.
A single-floor fit-out of around 500 square metres reads well at 60 seconds. That is the base: £2,500, setup and a 4K master included. Add a few social cuts pulled from the same film and you have a complete pitch asset for the price of a decent set of stills.
A three-floor office of around 1,500 square metres is a different brief. By the 60-seconds-per-500-square-metres rule it wants roughly 180 seconds to do the space justice. That is the £2,500 base plus four extra 30-second blocks at £1,000 each, so £6,500 for the film. If we are already producing stills of the same office, the 3D scene that sits underneath both is not charged twice, so the marginal cost of the walkthrough is just the animation and post on top of the renders you were buying anyway. That bundling is where the real saving sits, and it is the first thing I check when I scope a project.
Neither number includes a stereoscopic VR build or a free-roam interactive version. Those are separate productions, and for a tender pitch you almost never need them.
The honest limitation
I price offices. That is my world, and the numbers above are calibrated on years of fit-out and workplace projects for design-and-build firms. Residential and housing walkthroughs are not what I do, and the economics there are different enough that I would not quote you off this model. If your project is a housing development rather than an office, take the structure of this article, the front-loaded cost, the non-linear length, the model-sharing, but get a number from someone who lives in that niche.
Cheap is the expensive option
One last thing, because it decides more tenders than people admit. On a £3 to £5 million fit-out, the client reads your CGI as a preview of how you will finish the real space. A cheap, stiff walkthrough plants a doubt: if they cut corners on the film, what happens to the materials? I have watched that doubt lose the room. The studios that competed on price are mostly gone now, wiped out not by AI but by being cheap and forgettable.
A walkthrough is not a JPEG you are buying by the second. It is the asset that carries your pitch when nobody from your team is there to talk over it. Price it like that, and the £2,500 to £5,500 it costs to do properly looks like the cheapest part of winning the work.
The full service, with examples, sits on our 3D walkthrough service page, and you can run the live calculator on the price list.