From Weeks to Hours: MCAU Brings Urban Visions to Life with Gendo and AI-Powered Rendering

About MCAU

MCAU is a team of designers, planners, architects, researchers and strategists united by a shared purpose: to create extraordinary, sustainable places that inspire and elevate communities. We work across a variety of services and sectors offering: Design & Delivery, Placemaking, Masterplanning, Residential, Estate Renewal, Town Centre Mixed Use, Heritage Repurposing and Commercial.

Meet Liam Cox

Liam is an Urban Designer at MCAU, with a background in Architecture. He works on early stage work within the practice; from strategic visions to detailed planning submissions (RIBA 1-3).

Eager to find the tools to help communicate ideas quickly, Liam is part of an AI research lab at MCAU, currently exploring how varying AI tools can bring efficiencies into there workflow. He is particularly interested in how AI can enhance the front end visualisation process:

At the urban design level, visuals can sometimes be quite diagrammatic. Gendo helps us bridge that gap, showing clients and communities a vision they can immediately relate to.

Visualisation Before Gendo

Traditionally Liam has relied on Sketchup for White-card models and developed renders in house or through external consultants. While this approach has delivered quality results, it also introduces significant bottlenecks to the workflow process. Street level images can take a week or more to come back from visualisations team, and often require additional time for comments to picked up, slowing down the design process. Liam was looking for a way to introduce aspirational and realistic vision images in his and MCAU's early work flows to allow stakeholders to make the leap between how urban level schematic drawing and principles could translate into a real world vision.

Discovering Gendo

Liam first started using Gendo to explore its potential on a small infill site project. Starting from SketchUp massing, he used Gendo's Render, Material Selection and Enhance tool to quickly build up a realistic image of what the site could potentially offer. Instead of commissioning high cost and time hungry render packages, and intensive modelling Liam was able to:

✅ Apply prompts for red brick, metal cladding, hard and soft street landscaping and atmospheric lighting
✅ Experiment with varying iterations in minutes
✅ Drop in people and trees via reference images, bringing life and a sense of scale to the streets.

Each iteration takes 20–30 seconds. In just a couple of hours, we can develop images that used to take weeks and cost significantly more.

Impact on Workflow

Liam is championing the use of Gendo within the early stage work flow process at MCAU. It has helped him with:

✅ Fast decision making - images that previously took weeks can be done in a fraction of the time
✅ Client ready visuals - stakeholders can make the link between urban design principles and how they can have transformative effects through aspirational vision imagery.
✅ Reduced costs - the potential to generate higher quality renders in house.

Liam describes the process as flexible rather than strictly linear: jumping between prompting, material changes, and enhancing depending on the image. This adaptability allows MCAU to refine visuals organically as design conversations evolve.

Before

After

Liam began with a simple white card model in SketchUp, applying basic prompts for materials, lighting, and atmosphere. Iterations introduced material experiments, reference images, and photorealistic style prompts, gradually refining details such as brickwork, greenery, and windows.

By Stage 3, the he had produced a lively mews street scene: red brick facades, herringbone paving, lush planting, and people interacting. Using Gendo’s Enhance and Cinematic tools, they quickly achieved photorealistic results with crisp textures, realistic shadows, and an engaging atmosphere.

Client & Team Response

Stakeholders respond positively to the realism and clarity of Gendo-enhanced images. Instead of abstract diagrams, they can immediately imagine life in proposed streets and homes.

MCAU's architects and designers are looking to maximise the potential of AI for visualisation processes, Liam has found that Gendo has performed exceptionally well due to the tool speed and flexibility. While clients rarely request small tweaks, he has found it easier to iterate and polish concepts rapidly.

It’s not about replacing traditional renders completely. But for visionary, front-end images, Gendo has been incredibly beneficial.

Looking Ahead

MCAU is continuing to experiment with AI visualisation, including hand-sketched inputs and larger masterplan-scale imagery. As Gendo evolves, the team sees opportunities to integrate it further into community engagement, allowing more people to connect with urban design ideas early in the process.

Closing Thoughts

We’re still in the early stages, but already Gendo has changed how we work. For street-level visions, it’s helping us sell ideas quicker, more clearly, and at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional methods.

Watch the Gendo Live with Liam as special guest: https://youtu.be/akANadxeBDs?si=L5UeP_PUmdko8Den

Start for free with Gendo.