Unboxing reel: a room that comes out of one box.

What the Unboxing template does

Unboxing is one of the nine templates in Reels, the vertical video tool for interior design renders. You give it one finished render. It makes one keyframe for you to review, labelled Empty room with box, which this guide calls the box frame. The box frame is the same room emptied, with a plain white box standing on the floor at its centre. The reel then plays from the box frame to your render. The box opens, the pieces burst out and settle into place, and the last frame is the image you started with.

Box frame

Mid-reel

Final render

The box is what sets this template apart. It is a promise the viewer understands before anything moves: something is inside, so they wait for it to open. Then the joke lands. A sofa far bigger than the box climbs out of it, and the rest of the room follows it in. However playful the middle, the reel always ends on your render, and it is built to bring in only what that render contains. The room a viewer is left looking at is the scheme your client approved, not a loose version of it.

Unboxing, pop-in or fly-in: which reveal to use

All three furniture reveals start from your room emptied and end on your render. What differs is how the room fills, and whether a prop is on screen while it does.

Unboxing tells a delivery story. It reads naturally as a launch, a new commission or a finished scheme arriving. It reads less naturally as a slow look round a detailed room, because the box, not each piece, is the star, and in a 4-second clip each piece gets only a moment. If each piece deserves its own entrance, pop-in or fly-in will serve the scheme better.

Which renders make a good Unboxing reel

Choose a render with the scheme in the middle of the frame. Every reel is 9:16, so the shape of your render decides how much of the room survives.

A render made at 9:16 with the proportion picker goes into Reels uncropped. If the reel matters as much as the landscape still, create a 9:16 render of the room and start Reels from that. Check that it still matches the version your client approved. A landscape render is centre-cropped instead, which from a typical wide render leaves roughly the middle third of the width. Unboxing leans on that middle harder than most templates, because the box sits at the centre of the floor and the room grows out from there.

• One or two hero pieces with a clear silhouette. A curved sofa, a bed, a round dining table. Big shapes read as they burst out on a phone screen; a shelf of small objects turns into texture.
• Open floor at the centre. The box needs somewhere to stand, and the reveal reads best when the viewer can see the floor the pieces land on. This is where long rooms fail. With the sofa at one end and the dining table at the other, the box opens onto empty boards in the middle. The furniture that matters lands at the edges, or outside the crop altogether. A room grouped around a rug in the centre, like the preview, keeps everything in view.
• Legible architecture. Windows, the ceiling line and the floor should read plainly, so you can check that the box frame shows the same room.
• Height in the frame. A tall window, a run of ceiling spots or a floor lamp gives the vertical format a top while the box works the middle.

How to make an Unboxing reel in RoomGen Studio

Reels sits in the VIDEO group of the studio sidebar. The flow is two choices, then a four-step wizard: Frames, Settings, Generate and Result.

1. Choose the template. Pick Unboxing in the template panel, or press Expand to see every template at full size and compare it with the other eight.
2. Choose the render. Unboxing runs on one finished render. Pick the one you would happily end a presentation on, because it is the last thing the viewer sees.
3. Frames. Press Generate to make the box frame (150 credits), or choose Use my own to supply a still from the Gallery or an upload, which is free. Check it closely, then confirm it, or regenerate it with a short instruction (150 credits each time). For the reel to work, your own still has to show the same room from the same viewpoint, emptied, with the box already in place. Unless you have prepared one, the generated box frame is the practical route.
4. Settings. Choose Fast or Quality, and 720p or 1080p. There is no length to set: an Unboxing reel is one 4-second clip. The Generate button shows the exact credit total before you commit, and beside it how many reels at that price your balance covers. Go by the button rather than a remembered figure, because prices can change.
5. Generate, then Result. The finished MP4 saves to the project’s Gallery, ready to watch and download.

You don’t have to finish in one sitting. Close the wizard and Reels offers a resume card when you come back, with anything already paid for kept. Reels is on paid plans, and nothing is spent on video until you press Generate.

Getting the box frame right

Start with continuity. The box frame, your room emptied with the white box in place, is where the reel opens, and everything after it runs to your render. Read it closely. Check that the window sits in the same place, the boards run the same way, and the ceiling line and fittings match. A frame that quietly changes the room makes the reveal look like a cut to somewhere else.

Then decide what the box is meant to deliver. In the template’s preview, the curtains and the ceiling spotlights are already in the box frame, and the rug, sofa, table and lamp are what arrive. That split suits the format. A sofa bursting out of a box is a good joke. Curtains, a pendant, wall-hung art or a built-in bench climbing out of one would make little sense. If your scheme depends on pieces like that, keep them in the box frame, so the reveal only has to deliver what could plausibly be packed. Regenerate with a plain instruction such as “keep the rug” and that piece is down from the first frame.

Look at where the box stands, too. In the preview, the round coffee table comes to rest on the spot the box started from. That makes a useful rule of thumb: put the box where the centre of your finished group will be, on open floor. It also needs to be big enough to read as a box on a phone screen. If it sits somewhere awkward, try “smaller box nearer the window”, or ask for it on open floor in the middle of the room.

Check for leftovers as well. A side table or lamp that survived the emptying is visible from the first frame, and it gives the reveal away. This is the step to be fussy about. Each regeneration costs 150 credits, and a fault fixed here never reaches the clip you pay for.

Where an Unboxing reel earns its place

Anywhere the story is “here it is”. The empty room and the box pose a question, and the finished render answers it. That suits moments when you are presenting a result rather than explaining a process.

• Social posts. The box is on screen from the first frame, which gives a scrolling viewer a reason to stop and wait for it to open. A finished project, a new commission or a scheme you are proud of each make one post.
• Client presentations. End a concept meeting on the reveal, or send it after sign-off. It lands on the render they approved, so it confirms the decision rather than reopening it.
• Home staging. A vacant room furnished in a single move is the whole pitch of staging, which makes it a natural post for home stagers adding a virtual service.
• Furniture and homeware launches. For a brand whose pieces arrive boxed, the prop is already part of the story: a new collection comes out of one plain box and sets itself up in a finished room.

The MP4 is already the vertical shape that Instagram Reels, TikTok and YouTube Shorts are built around, so it goes up without reframing. Captions and music go on in the app you post from. Keep any text away from the edges, where each app lays its own buttons and captions over the frame. Preview the post in the app before it goes out.

Near a property listing, label the reel as a design proposal or virtual staging, since none of the furniture comes with the house. Disclosure rules vary from market to market, and the guide to AI video on property listings covers how to label a clip built from staged imagery.

What the Unboxing reel will not do

It will not choreograph the middle for you. The moments between the box frame and your render are generated, and not every piece has to come out of the box. In the template’s preview, the coffee table rises out of the open box. The rug spreads across the floor from beside it, though, and the floor lamp swings in from beside the window. Watch the whole reel once before it goes to a client or a feed.

A finished reel has no redo button. If a moment looks wrong, start a new Unboxing run from the same render. That is a fresh run: you confirm a box frame again, generated or your own, and the clip is charged again at the price the Generate button shows. Before you pay twice, work out where the fault started. A leftover lamp or a box in an awkward spot is a box-frame problem, so fix the frame in the new run before you generate. Retry only appears when a clip fails outright rather than finishing.

It will not pass for a real delivery, and it should not try. The sofa is visibly bigger than the box it came out of, which is the fun of it. That same obviousness makes it the wrong reel for anywhere a viewer expects a record of real work. Keep it to proposals, launches and portfolio posts.

It shows one moment, not a space. For moving through a room rather than revealing it, turning a render into a video with a camera move is the better tool, and it keeps a landscape shape for a website or a slide.

Run Unboxing on the sample project first, then on the render in your portfolio with the strongest centre. If the floor and walls are part of your work too, the Room builds itself reel starts from a bare shell instead of a box.

This guide is kept by the RoomGen Studio team and describes Reels as it works on 28 September 2026. You can read more about RoomGen Studio and how the team works.