How much does real-time 3D product visualisation cost?

Real-time is not a rendered video

A rendered video is a film of a product. Real-time means the geometry is in the browser and the visitor controls the camera, which is a different job: it has to hold frame rate on a phone, degrade gracefully on hardware that cannot run it, and download fast enough that nobody leaves first.

Both are legitimate. A video is cheaper and sometimes better. Real-time earns its cost when the thing being sold has to be examined rather than watched.

Your files set the date

A clean model from a manufacturer shortens the job by a week. A model built for print or for offline rendering usually needs reducing, retopologising and re-texturing before it will run in a browser at all. A photograph of the product is not a starting point, and modelling from scratch is quoted separately once we have seen what you have.

This is why the delivery is scoped instead of fixed. We would rather give a date we can hold after looking at the files than a number that slips.

Why it costs less here than a quote you have seen

A lot of studios sell this and subcontract it, which puts a margin on top of somebody else's day rate. When the work is done in-house the second margin is not there.

That is the whole explanation. It is not a lower quality tier, and the frame rate target is the same one an agency would quote you three times as much for.

What is excluded

Licences for third-party models, textures and environment maps. Native app or headset builds, because this is the web. And anything that needs a top-end graphics card to hit frame rate, since the target is mid-range hardware and the fallback is what older devices get.