Visualization by 100CGI Studio for an interior architecture practice: an exclusive lounge and bar inside One Za'abeel in Dubai. Five stills went to the board for sign-off after 20 days and 3 revision rounds.
The brief is one of the harder ones a render engine gets, because nearly everything in the room reflects. The walls are brushed champagne gold. The floor is book-matched calacatta. Glass display pavilions stand in the space, and the bar is a circular block of white onyx. Floor-to-ceiling glazing pours daylight across all of it.
Each of those surfaces fails in its own way. Too little control and the room turns into a flat artificial mirror; too much light and it becomes a noisy field of blown highlights. The shaders were built for this room instead of being pulled from a library.
The lighting has two sources that pull against each other: hard daylight filtered through sheer mesh blinds, and the warm interior arrays with their sculptural glass-drop chandeliers. Getting the pair to agree is what separates a room that reads expensive from one that reads like a showroom, and it is where most of the time went. The geometry was settled long before the light was.
Rendered in 3ds Max and Corona. Full case study: One Za'abeel Lounge.
