Nick LeBlanc and Greg Miles turned a COVID-era deep-dive into 3D software into Luminous Labs — a Halifax firm that helps developers sell buildings before a single foundation is poured. This episode is a primer on what photorealistic visualization actually costs, what it saves, and why Atlantic Canada used to ship that work to Russia.
Before Luminous Labs existed, a Halifax developer who wanted buyers to picture a future condo had two options: build a physical model suite — an actual furnished unit, sitting empty and unrented — or wire money to a render shop in Russia or China and wait. Neither was especially satisfying. The model suite bled vacancy revenue every month it sat. The overseas shops brought the thing Nick LeBlanc describes plainly: "you run into the communication barrier the time difference… language barrier which is a huge one actually."
LeBlanc and his co-founder Greg Miles started Luminous Labs out of that gap. LeBlanc grew up around his father's architecture practice and came up gaming. Miles had been on track to become a CPA in Calgary before pandemic restrictions cleared his calendar. When COVID shut everything down, the two used the window hard: "we were probably able to cram about three or four years of learning if we were working full-time into a year." That compression — intensive, uninterrupted tool-time in Blender, Unreal Engine, and the panorama platforms — is how a startup that didn't exist before 2020 arrived with a real portfolio.
The business case has two legs: kill the model suite and catch the mistake
The first leg is the vacancy argument. A physical model suite sits unused for months or years, carrying the opportunity cost of an unrented unit. "the model suites that are traditionally done—you have to build them and then it's an empty space that's unoccupied, so that's revenue you could be getting." A photorealistic virtual tour replaces that experience without sacrificing a unit.
The second leg is subtler and often more immediately convincing to developers: mistake prevention. On a multi-storey building, a wrong exterior colour or a misspecified material can mean an expensive correction. "if you can catch one mistake in pre-construction and it saves you 20 grand then you pay yourself." One avoided error on a large project can cover the entire render package. Framed that way, the visualization budget stops looking like a marketing line item and starts looking like insurance.
The smartest framing LeBlanc offers is about process, not output. When a developer is choosing between two layout options or two material specs, showing both via renders is almost always cheaper than committing to one and regretting it: "any time that we are showing you options it's going to be quite a bit cheaper than if you just say I'm gonna go with this one and you end up not liking it." Use the render as a decision tool before it becomes a marketing asset.
The client that surprised them — and the one that didn't
Luminous Labs launched expecting architects to be their core market. The firm's founders have architecture in their background; the product is inherently spatial. What they found was different. "we just didn't really realize how much of an appetite that the developers would have for these full virtual tours." Developers — not architects — turned out to be the clients who wanted the complete package: interactive tours, multiple unit types, drone panoramas woven into the CG interiors, analytics on where buyers clicked.
That last item matters more than it first sounds. Luminous Labs uses 3D Vista for its analytics-enabled virtual tours (versus Kuula for simpler projects), which means a developer can see exactly which spaces their buyers spend time in. "75% of the time people are clicking on the gym so if we are creating some material maybe we should put three photos of the gym." The tour becomes a research tool that shapes the rest of the marketing budget.
Real Halifax projects show the range. For The Margaretta on Clyde Street — a 9-storey, 147-unit mixed-use building — Luminous Labs produced 360-degree panoramas across 100-plus interior positions, with drone sphere photography from outside the building dropped in as window views. That last detail is a practical one: "a photo is far more realistic than we could ever model… it uses almost no computer resources." Real aerial photography as the backdrop beats a fully modelled city every time, and it's cheaper to produce.
On the Canard Centre (developed by Southwest Properties, which operates more than 1,860 apartments and condos concentrated in downtown Halifax) and the Queen's Marque waterfront streetscape, the scope expanded to full walkthroughs using Unreal Engine 5 — the same technology powering contemporary video games, and the same rendering pipeline behind the Mandalorian's 360-LED virtual production stage. That's not a coincidence or a novelty: Unreal's real-time ray tracing is genuinely photorealistic now, and Luminous Labs adopted it because the output quality justifies the learning curve.
When a Revit model arrives, the price drops 30–40%
Here is the most concrete number in the episode for developers who use Revit: "there are times where we can actually quote 30 to 40 percent of what we normally would because we have that revit model." The modelling phase — taking a building from drawings to a workable 3D shell — is a large portion of the labour on any render job. When a developer hands over an existing Revit file, that work is already done.
For developers and architects evaluating visualization costs: get your Revit file organized before you go to market. A clean, current model is worth a third off the quote.
The software stack behind this is genuinely multi-tool. Lumion is fast and usable but not photorealistic at the high end. Blender is free, powerful, and the workhorse for complex modelling. Unreal Engine handles the real-time walkthroughs. None of it is plug-and-play: "you have to know a little bit of photography you have to know the 3d program you have to understand marketing construction real estate." That crossover — 3D craft plus architectural knowledge plus marketing instinct — is what keeps the field from being commoditized. It takes years to build, and it shows in the output.
The library is the moat, and it took hundreds of hours to build
Beyond software, Luminous Labs' practical competitive edge is a pre-built library of roughly 5,000 3D assets — furniture, fixtures, finishes, architectural details — organized and ready to drop into a project. LeBlanc is direct about what that required: "I've spent hundreds of hours organizing our model library so that when it is actually go time to drop everything in then we are dropping in our finished asset."
Ad-hoc sourcing — hunting for a credible sofa model mid-project, or building a custom light fixture from scratch — is where time disappears. A well-organized library compresses that. It's not glamorous work, but it's the kind of preparation that separates a shop that hits deadlines from one that doesn't.
The hardware investment compounds this. GPU performance roughly doubles every two years — a pattern documented as Huang's Law and visible in Nvidia's recent generation-over-generation jumps. What that means practically: "what took you 15 hours to render still now takes us about 10 minutes—that's just in the last two years alone." If you're in render-heavy production, budgeting for GPU hardware upgrades is not optional equipment — it's the clock speed your whole operation runs on.
Where the market is going
Halifax's construction market was already active when this episode was recorded in early 2022; the city's density pressure and waterfront development pipeline gave Luminous Labs a ready backlog. The longer-term thesis is more interesting: LeBlanc floats the possibility that photorealistic renders could eventually be mandated as part of the permitting process — a public-facing proof-of-intent before a project breaks ground. That's speculative, but not outlandish. Several jurisdictions have moved toward community-engagement visualization requirements, and the cost of producing them has fallen sharply.
The metaverse adjacency LeBlanc mentions — the idea that a photorealistic virtual building is one step from an NFT-registered digital property — is more distant. What's immediate is the Halifax boom itself: more cranes, more developer clients, more units that need to be pre-leased before construction is complete. Visualization isn't a novelty in that environment. It's a standard pre-sales tool, and the question developers are now asking is not whether to do it but where to source it and what it should cost.
For the ones sourcing locally: the communication, time-zone, and quality-control headaches of overseas render shops are real, and a Halifax firm with regional project knowledge and a 5,000-asset library ready to go commands a legitimate premium over them.
Guests: Nick LeBlanc and Greg Miles, co-founders, Luminous Labs. Featured on Episode 25 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Watch the full episode. Also featured: Southwest Properties — Halifax-based developer and operator of more than 1,860 apartments and condos across downtown Halifax and the waterfront, active in apartment, condo, retail, office, and hospitality development. GPU performance doubling timeline sourced to Huang's Law.