Summary:
- To navigate changing housing regulations and speed up its workflow, UK homebuilder Bellway integrated Enscape and the AI tool Veras into its Revit design process.
- Integrating AI into their visualization pipeline reduced manual CGI rendering times by 66% while simultaneously doubling the visual quality.
- The accelerated production enables faster internal decision-making and provides sales teams with high-quality assets long before construction begins.
As one of the UK’s largest homebuilders, Bellway operates in a highly competitive industry where designs, regulations, and customer expectations are constantly evolving. High-quality visualization plays an important role throughout the business, helping teams evaluate and communicate design options, support planning decisions, and create compelling imagery that helps future homeowners understand and engage with developments before construction is complete.
To stay competitive, Bellway uses Enscape for fast, intuitive visualization directly within its design workflow, and has recently added Veras, Chaos’ AI-powered visualization tool, to reduce manual visualization work and make it easier to explore and refine design options without slowing things down.
The team also plans to extend this connected workflow with Envision in the near future to add photorealistic real-time rendering with rapid animation capabilities to its presentations. This transition will be even more seamless with the new Live Link between Envision and Enscape, which will allow the Bellway team to move from real-time design exploration in Enscape to a fully ray-traced walkthrough in Envision in a single click.
When visualization becomes the bottleneck
The introduction of the UK’s Future Homes Standard, a set of regulations aimed at improving energy efficiency and reducing carbon emissions, along with growing demand for more inclusive, accessible housing, has added to the workload on Bellway’s visualization team.
Bellway’s Group BIM Manager, David Law, is part of a team responsible for developing standardized house designs for a portfolio of homes that meet these evolving requirements. These designs are then passed on to regional divisions as the starting point for full residential developments.
Credit: Bellway
Beyond supporting design development and planning submissions, the team also creates visualizations that help sales and marketing teams communicate future homes and developments before construction begins. The team produces renderings for interactive marketing materials and Bellway’s standard house type range, helping prospective buyers better understand the look and feel of completed homes and communities.
“Historically, creating compelling visual assets was a manual and time-intensive process for us,” said Law. “We spent significant time placing landscaping elements, adjusting lighting, refining camera angles, and repeatedly tweaking scenes to create marketing-ready imagery.”
In some cases, CGI work was also outsourced to external partners, which added cost, longer lead times, and made it difficult to respond quickly when designs changed. As requirements increased, visualization increasingly became a bottleneck, struggling to keep up with the speed of iteration and project delivery.
Building a more connected visualization workflow
Bellway has used Enscape for nearly a decade, choosing it for its ease of use, speed, and support from Chaos.
“Workflow-wise, Enscape works perfectly as a plugin for Revit,” said Law. “We design everything in Revit and being able to stay within this environment while jumping into Enscape on another screen to check for clashes, to see arrangements of rooms, and to get the "feel" for a space—while making changes in real time—works beautifully.”
Building on this foundation, the team recently added Veras into its workflow, creating a more connected design-to-visualization process where changes can move through without interruption.
“Going from Revit into Enscape with a click, and then into Veras with another click, is far more efficient than opening separate software and moving files around,” said Law. “Any design changes we make are instantly reflected, which keeps the process moving smoothly.”
Within this setup, Enscape is used for real-time design review and validation, helping teams:
- Spot issues earlier in the design process
- “Fly through” models to understand layouts and detect clashes
- Produce visuals for internal reviews and wider project discussions
- Create sales and marketing materials for house-type portfolios and catalogs
Veras builds on this by taking much of the manual work out of CGI creation, especially around lighting, entourage, and scene setup.
“When we discovered Veras, we integrated it into every CGI we create,” said Law. “It helps us generate more realistic lighting, add entourage like people and foliage, and quickly produce high-quality visuals for both marketing and design review. Faster content creation also means our sales teams can access stronger visuals earlier in the process.”
Stronger results in a fraction of the time
By embedding Veras into its workflow, Bellway has significantly reduced the manual effort required to produce final visuals, while also improving overall quality.
“Before Veras, creating a finished visualization involved a lot of manual work,” said Law. “What used to take around three hours now takes closer to an hour, and the final CGI quality is twice as good. We’re getting stronger results in a fraction of the time.”
This shift has changed how the team works day to day. Instead of being constrained by the effort required to produce each image, Bellway can iterate more freely, explore more design options, and refine concepts earlier in the process, helping reduce the risk of costly changes later.
The impact extends beyond design teams. Faster visualization production also helps Bellway provide sales and marketing teams with high-quality imagery earlier in the development process, making it easier to communicate the look and feel of future homes and communities before construction is complete.
Credit: Bellway
Visualization has also improved internal alignment and decision making.
“Real-time visualization has changed how we make decisions internally,” Law added. “Not everyone can interpret a floor plan the same way, but when we can quickly create and compare visual options, teams immediately understand the differences. It helps us make faster decisions and reach the right outcome with more confidence.”
Overall, Chaos tools have helped Bellway bring visualization closer to the design process, making it faster to iterate, easier to collaborate, and more efficient to move from concept to decision while also helping sales teams communicate future developments more effectively. The result is a more responsive workflow that supports both speed and quality in a highly competitive market.
