Introducing Boards — sketch, render and share on one canvas

Vizbase has always started at the same place: you have a view, you upload it, you get a render back. That works well once you know what you want. It works badly for the part before that — the part where you're still collecting references, sketching over a plan, and putting three options side by side to work out which one to take to the client.

Boardsis that missing part. It's an infinite canvas inside your Vizbase account where you can draw, drop in images, arrange your renders — and render anything on the canvas without leaving it. It went live in beta on 11 August 2026.

The canvas in front of the render

Most design decisions don't happen inside a render tool. They happen in a scatter of browser tabs, a Pinterest board, a marked-up PDF, and a WhatsApp thread with a client. Then someone consolidates all of that into a single decision, opens the render tool, and produces one image.

Boards moves that scatter into the same place as the render. You can pull reference images off the web, drag in renders you've already made, sketch a massing idea by hand, and annotate any of it — then select the thing you care about and turn it into a photorealistic render on the spot. The render lands on the canvas next to its source, with an arrow connecting the two, so the board keeps a visible record of what came from where.

What you can do on a board

Draw and compose.Freehand brush tools with four presets — Fine, Pen, Marker and Highlight — plus an architectural colour palette, shapes, arrows, text, and frames. There's a grid picker and a canvas background colour, both saved per board.

Bring images in.A Renders panel down the left side gives you your recent renders, your favourites, and your renders grouped by project — click or drag any of them onto the canvas. You can also paste or drop image files, or paste a direct image link and let Vizbase fetch it.

Render from the canvas. Select a sketch or an image and a floating toolbar appears: pick an engine, type a one-line prompt, and hit Quick Render. The button shows the credit cost before you press it. A sketch drawn in twelve separate pen strokes still counts as one sketch — the selection expands to the whole connected cluster, so you never accidentally render half a drawing.

Refine by drawing on it. Scribble over part of a render on the canvas, select the render and your strokes together, and those strokes become the mask for a regional edit. The refined version appears next to the original instead of replacing it.

Use a frame as a view.Draw a frame around part of the canvas and render its contents as a single composition — frames end up working like repeatable camera views on the board.

Quick Render is not the render workflow — on purpose

Quick Render and the main render workflow use the same engines and cost the same credits, but they are not the same tool. Quick Render takes one thing: your selection, plus a single line of prompt. There's no scene analysis, no per-element material assignment, no Lock Elements, and it returns one image rather than a set of variations. It offers the three single-pass engines — Gen 2.0, 2.1 and 4.0 — because the multi-pass ones are too slow to keep a canvas feeling live.

That's the trade we wanted. Boards is where you move fast and look at things next to each other; the render workflow is where you slow down and control the result surface by surface. When a board render is worth finishing properly, select it and choose Use as source— that opens a normal Vizbase project from the full-resolution original, with the whole material and locking workflow available.

Sharing, and working on the same board together

Every board has a Share button with three settings. Off keeps it private. View only mints a public link at vizbase.ai/b/… that anyone can open without an account — useful for sending a client a board to look at. Can editinvites someone onto the canvas properly: they sign in to Vizbase, join as a guest editor, and from then on you're both drawing on the same board with live cursors.

Guest editors can render too. On a team board those renders draw from the team owner's shared credit pool; on a personal board, the guest spends their own credits. Guest seats are per board and come with your plan — two on Starter, five on Pro, ten on Studio. Any link can be revoked at any time.

On Pro and Studio, upload your logo in Settings and shared boards carry your studio's branding instead of ours.

What it costs

Boards itself doesn't introduce new pricing. Free accounts include one board; every paid plan includes unlimited boards. Renders made from a board cost the same credits as renders made anywhere else in Vizbase, billed to the same balance. Drawing, importing images, sharing and exporting the canvas are all free.

If you want to take a board render further — upscale it for print, or run the full material workflow on it — select it and choose Use as source, which starts a normal Vizbase project from the full-resolution original.

It's in beta, and that's the point

Boards is live for every Vizbase account, and it's in beta. The core loop — draw, render, refine, share — is built and hardened, and there are rough edges we already know about: version history exists but has no interface yet, refining by markup only works on renders rather than on plain uploaded images, and the board list doesn't refresh on its own.

We'd rather have it in front of real projects now than polish it in private for another two months. If something breaks, or something obvious is missing, tell us: Report a bug in the app sidebar, or email support@vizbase.ai. Beta is when that feedback still changes the shape of the thing.

Getting started

Open Boardsin the sidebar and create one. Drag in a render you've already made, or sketch something rough, select it, and press Quick Render. That's the whole loop — everything else on the canvas is there to support it.

New to Vizbase? Start free — every account includes credits to try a render, and a board to try it on. If you work in SketchUp, the SketchUp plugin pairs naturally with Boards: capture views from your model, then arrange and render them on a canvas.

Frequently asked questions