How to repaint surfaces in a room walkthrough and leave the floor alone

Last updated 2026-09-10 · 8 min read

What is the short version?

A colour filter changes everything that happens to be that colour, which in a room means the cabinets and the floorboards and part of the wall. What you need is a matte that follows each surface as the camera moves past it.

1. Go to Vizard Agent with the walkthrough.
2. Say which surfaces change and to what.
3. Say which surfaces must stay exactly as they are.

What do you need before you start?

The footage and a decision about scope. It is worth being specific — "make the interior white" covers at least four different jobs, and the difference between including the cabinets and excluding them is most of the work.

• The walkthrough as filmed.
• Which surfaces change. Walls, ceiling, units, doors.
• The colour. A value if you have one.
• What must not change. The floor, the worktops, the fittings.
• How complete. Every room, or one.

What do you type into Vizard Agent?

List the surfaces on both sides of the line for Vizard Agent. The request that causes rework is always the one that names only what changes, because every surface you leave unnamed becomes a judgement call that somebody has to make on your behalf.

Prompt

Variants worth knowing:

• "The floor stays exactly as it is." The protected surface.
• "All the cupboards." Or say which ones.
• "A test on one section." Before the whole walkthrough.

What does Vizard Agent actually do?

Here is the order Vizard Agent worked in on a real interior walkthrough that had to be repainted. The first half tries the cheap approach and the second half builds a proper matte, which is the shape of most jobs like this.

1. Samples frames to identify the interior and how the camera moves.
2. Checks the colour-processing options and renders a short test.
3. Reviews that test before touching the full video.
4. Samples the whole walkthrough to map where each surface appears.
5. Reviews the contact sheet to find every place the cabinets show.
6. Tests a selective treatment that leaves the floor untouched.
7. Reruns it with a corrected mask when the first one bleeds.
8. Checks the corrected test for white cabinets and an unchanged floor.
9. Adds timestamps to the samples so each region can be masked accurately.
10. Extracts full-size key frames for precise masks.
11. Builds surface-only overlays and renders the recoloured walkthrough.
12. Checks the whole walkthrough for coverage and floor preservation.
13. Compares original against edited at representative moments.
14. Strengthens the treatment where it reads too weakly.
15. Tracks the cupboards through the video with object segmentation.
16. Inspects what the segmentation actually returned — a matte or a cutout.
17. Reads the log to verify rather than assuming from the picture.
18. Generates the explicit matte needed for a reliable composite.

Steps fifteen to eighteen are where this becomes reliable. A filter has no idea what a cabinet is; a tracked matte follows the actual object through the camera move, and the difference shows up the moment the camera turns a corner.

Step nine is a small piece of bookkeeping that pays for itself. Putting timestamps on the sampled frames means every mask can be tied to a moment in the walkthrough rather than to a picture somebody has to find again, which is what makes a correction later cost one region instead of a fresh pass.

Step sixteen is a habit worth carrying anywhere. A tool that returns an image can be returning a mask or a finished cutout, and treating one as the other produces a result that looks nearly right and composites completely wrong.

What does the result look like?

A walkthrough where the surfaces you named are the colour you asked for and the ones you protected are exactly as filmed — including at the moments the camera turns, which is where a filter-based version falls apart.

Somebody who knows the room sees a redecoration, not an effect.

When does this not work well?

The surfaces have to be distinguishable from each other in the first place. A white wall meeting a pale floor, a reflective worktop, or a room lit so unevenly that one surface reads as three different colours all make the boundary hard for Vizard Agent to hold.

• Similar colours meeting. The boundary is hard to find.
• Reflective surfaces. They carry the old colour in reflections.
• Very uneven lighting. One surface reads as several.
• Fast camera movement. Tracking loses the edges.
• Glass and mirrors. They show the unchanged room.

How do you fix a result that came back wrong?

Name the surface that is wrong and the moment in the walkthrough where you can see it. Vizard Agent keeps the mapping it built and the mattes behind it, so a correction adjusts one region rather than re-treating the entire walkthrough again.

• "The floor changed too." The matte tightened at that boundary.
• "It is not white enough." The treatment strengthened and re-checked.
• "It slips when the camera turns." The tracking rebuilt there.
• "Leave the doors alone." Excluded as their own surface.

How does Vizard Agent compare to doing it yourself?

By hand this starts as a colour adjustment because that is the quickest thing to try, and it works on the frame you were looking at. The floor going pale with the walls is discovered later, usually on the shot where the camera pans across both.

Common questions

Can it change only the cabinets? Yes. Vizard Agent tracks them as their own surface.

Will the floor be safe? Yes, and Vizard Agent checks it across the whole walkthrough.

Can I give an exact colour? Yes. Vizard Agent works better from a value than a colour name.

What about worktops and handles? Name them and Vizard Agent excludes or includes them.

Will it hold when the camera moves? That is what the tracking is for; Vizard Agent verifies it.

Can I see a test first? Yes. Vizard Agent tests one section before the full render.

Does it work on a still photo? Yes, and Vizard Agent finds a still much simpler.

What about reflections in glass? They will show the old colour; Vizard Agent will point that out.

Can it do several rooms? Yes. Vizard Agent maps each room separately.

Will the lighting still look right? Vizard Agent keeps the shading rather than flattening the surface.

Can it try two colours? Yes. Ask Vizard Agent for both to compare.

What if the room is dark? Harder, and Vizard Agent will say what is achievable.

Does the audio change? No. For Vizard Agent this is a picture-only pass.

Why not just adjust the colour? Because a colour adjustment does not know what a cabinet is, and everything else the same shade goes with it.