NEST: How We Made an Architectural Visualization Film with a Bird's Eye, an AI Pipeline, and No Physical Camera
- Marketing and Info
- 2 hours ago
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There is a moment, early in the production of NEST, where we stopped thinking about it as an architectural film.
We were looking at reference footage of a Javan Hawk-Eagle — Nisaetus bartelsi, endemic to the forests of Java, listed as vulnerable by the IUCN — and something shifted. The bird doesn't observe architecture. It reads landscape. It feels altitude, wind, the geometry of the canopy below. Its relationship with built form is instinctive, physical, emotional in a way no human walkthrough can replicate.
That became the film.
Not a tour of a building. Not a marketing reel. A meditation on what it means to build within nature, told through the eyes of a creature that has lived among the trees of Java for thousands of years — long before the first foundation was poured.
NEST is our entry for the CGarchitect 3D Awards 2026 and Architizer Vision Awards 2026 (Experimental Film). It is also the most technically ambitious film we have ever made.
Here is how we built it.
Why a Javan Hawk-Eagle
The choice of narrator was not arbitrary. The Javan Hawk-Eagle is one of the most critically watched raptors in Southeast Asia — a symbol of the tension between development and ecology, between what we build and what we displace.
For an experimental architectural film, this tension is exactly the right foundation. Architecture does not exist in a vacuum. It sits on land. It interrupts ecosystems. It creates new ones. The hawk-eagle, flying over a construction site, carries all of that complexity in a single frame.
The FPV (first-person view) perspective from the eagle also gave us something no conventional cinematic drone shot can achieve: a visceral, instinctive sense of flight. Not the smooth, controlled arc of a stabilized gimbal. The muscular, reactive movement of a predator reading thermals.
That required a completely different approach to camera work — and a completely different approach to production.
The Pipeline: Hybrid, Not Pure
NEST is not a purely AI-generated film. It is not a purely CGI film. It is something we are calling a hybrid cinematic pipeline — a production methodology where traditional 3D visualization, real-time rendering, and AI-generated content are woven together at the sequence level, not layered on top of each other in post.
Here is how each tool was used, and why:
3ds Max + Chaos Corona — the photorealistic foundation
The architecture, materials, and static environment were built and rendered in 3ds Max with Chaos Corona Renderer. This is our core pipeline for a reason: Corona's physical light simulation produces a quality of atmosphere — the softness of diffused tropical light, the way moisture affects aerial perspective — that remains unmatched for photoreal archviz.
For NEST, the built environment needed to feel real enough that the eagle's flight over it would feel real. That starts with the geometry and materials, not the AI.
Kling AI + Seedance 2.0 — the eagle sequences
The eagle's flight was generated using Kling AI and Seedance 2.0. This was the most experimental part of the pipeline — and the most revelatory.
We developed a detailed prompt architecture for the FPV sequences: altitude, wing position, banking angle, ground speed, atmospheric haze, the specific quality of morning light at 400 metres above Java's hill country. The AI-generated shots were then composited against the UE5 and Corona environments.
What we found: AI video generation, when given precise, cinematic prompts, produces camera movement that no drone operator can replicate. The physics are not quite physical — and that slight unreality is exactly right for a film narrated by a creature we have never inhabited.
Suno AI — original score
The score for NEST was composed entirely in Suno AI, with iterative direction from our creative team. We briefed the music as we would brief a composer: tension without aggression. Altitude without coldness. The feeling of watching something ancient and something new exist in the same frame.
Suno produced a score that we could not have commissioned on a traditional production budget. More importantly, it produced a score that responded to our specific emotional brief — not a stock library approximation of it.
Dreamina + Nanobanana — supporting visual elements
Additional visual development — environmental matte painting, transitional frames, and title treatment — used Dreamina and Nanobanana for specific image generation tasks. These were used as tools within a controlled creative process, not as replacements for artistic direction.
What This Film Changed for Us in Architectural Visualization
NEST changed how we think about what an architectural film can be.
The conventional archviz film follows a known grammar: reveal the exterior, explore the interior, show the lifestyle, end on a signature shot. It is effective. It is predictable. It is increasingly invisible to an audience that has seen hundreds of them.
NEST proposes a different grammar. Architecture as one element within a larger story. Built form in dialogue with natural form. Human construction seen from a perspective that predates human construction entirely.
The film is not a marketing tool in the conventional sense. It does not show a specific project for a specific developer. It is an argument — about what visualization can mean when it stops trying to sell a building and starts trying to say something true about the relationship between what we build and where we build it.
Whether that argument lands is for audiences and juries to decide. What we know is that making it changed our studio.
What Comes Next
The hybrid pipeline developed for NEST is now part of our standard production methodology. Elements of it are already in use in client projects — the AI scoring approach, the Seedance-generated motion sequences, the UE5 real-time environment workflow.
We are also developing NEST as a presentation for SIGGRAPH Asia 2026 Computer Animation Festival — sharing the pipeline and the creative philosophy with the broader CG and film production community.
For the architectural visualization industry, we believe this represents something significant. Not because AI is going to replace the craft of 3D visualization — it is not. But because the combination of AI tools with the precision and intentionality of traditional archviz opens up a creative territory that neither alone can reach.
NEST lives in that territory. We intend to keep exploring it.
— Kunkun Visual
Bandung, Indonesia & Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia