System Group Lounge

• Four-zone amenity floor, Tehran
• Photoreal 3ds Max and V-Ray imagery
• Finishes approved before install

Why 3ds Max and V-Ray for a Workplace Interior

The pairing of Autodesk 3ds Max with the Chaos V-Ray renderer has been the default high-end architectural and interior visualization stack for well over a decade, and for an interior of this type it remains a very rational choice.

Interiors are a lighting problem before they are a modelling problem

The character of an amenity floor comes almost entirely from light: the warmth of the linear fittings in the ribbed ceiling, how daylight passes through the glazed partitions between zones, how the brick reads when it is grazed rather than flatly lit. V-Ray is a physically based production renderer with mature global illumination, and it is built to resolve exactly this class of problem, where indirect bounce off timber and brick determines whether the space looks warm or dead.

Material accuracy matters when finishes are the design

In a fit-out project the design decisions are largely material decisions. V-Ray's material system reproduces the behaviour of the specific surfaces used here, the sheen of a timber floor, the roughness of brick, the reflectivity of glass partitions and the fabric of the lounge seating, with enough fidelity that a client can approve a finish from an image rather than from a sample board alone.

Modelling flexibility for bespoke joinery

Amenity interiors are full of one-off elements: the ceiling ribs, reception joinery, banquette seating, games equipment. 3ds Max is a general-purpose modelling environment rather than a building-modelling tool, which makes it well suited to geometry that has no parametric building equivalent, and it interoperates readily with architectural models produced elsewhere.

Four spaces, one consistent set of images

Because the project is divided into four environments that must feel like one scheme, the visualization has to hold a consistent lighting and material treatment across all of them. Working in a single scene with a single render engine is what makes that consistency straightforward.

Four programmes on one floor

The brief combines an entrance, a sports and games area, a restaurant and a lounge in a single tenancy. Each has different acoustic, servicing and furniture requirements, and the design had to keep them from interfering with one another while still reading as one continuous environment.

Making a commercial shell feel like hospitality

Corporate amenity spaces are usually built inside an ordinary office shell with fixed floor-to-ceiling heights, existing services and standard grids. Producing a genuinely relaxed atmosphere within those constraints is a material and lighting problem rather than a planning one, which puts a great deal of weight on getting finishes right.

Approval without a physical reference

An entertainment interior is judged on atmosphere, and atmosphere is precisely what a plan, an elevation or a sample board cannot convey. The design had to be signed off by a corporate client on the basis of representations alone.

Consistency across zones

Because the four spaces are separated, there is a real risk of them reading as four unrelated fit-outs. Holding a single material and lighting language across all of them was a constraint on every subsequent decision.

The traditional way to present an interior fit-out of this kind is a combination of hand or CAD perspectives, finish and material sample boards, and furniture cut sheets, with the client asked to assemble the final impression mentally from those parts.

That method works for experienced clients but transfers a lot of risk. Sample boards show a material in isolation rather than at the scale and under the lighting it will actually have, and orthographic drawings say nothing about how four adjacent environments will feel in sequence. Photorealistic rendering replaces that act of imagination with something closer to evidence.

No account of the design team's own prior workflow has been published for this project, so the comparison above describes general practice in interior design rather than a documented change of method.

No cost or programme figures have been published for this project, so no savings or return figures are claimed here. What can be set out is the type of value photorealistic visualization contributes to a workplace fit-out of this scale.

Design decisions made against images rather than samples

In a fit-out the largest avoidable cost is changing a finish, a joinery item or a lighting layout after it has been ordered or installed. Rendering the space to a photorealistic standard moves that judgement forward to a point where changing a timber tone or a partition position costs nothing but a re-render.

Atmosphere becomes reviewable

Staff amenity space exists to be used. If the lounge feels institutional or the restaurant feels like a canteen, the investment does not return, and that outcome is not visible in a drawing. Photorealistic imagery lets a client assess the thing they are actually buying, which is how the space will feel to the people working there.

Coherence across the four zones

Rendering all four environments from one scene, with one lighting model and one material library, makes inconsistencies obvious before construction rather than after, which protects the sense that this is a single designed floor rather than four separate projects.

Reuse of the visualization asset

Interior renderings produced for client approval are routinely reused afterwards for internal communications, recruitment material and the designer's own portfolio. For a corporate client, images of a well-resolved amenity floor have a second life as an employer-brand asset, at no additional production cost.

Project details

Project: System Group Lounge, entertainment and amenity area interior design. Location: Tehran, Iran. Completion: 2020. Programme: entrance, sports and games area, restaurant and lounge. Tools: Autodesk 3ds Max and Chaos V-Ray. Submitted to aec+tech by Anahita Mosayebi.

About System Group

System Group, or Hamkaran System, was founded in 1987 and is headquartered in Tehran. It is described as Iran's largest private software development company, operating as a group of 58 companies, and has served more than 53,000 clients. In 2011 it became the first Iranian software company to be listed on the stock market.

Note for readers

This entry is a designer-submitted case study. Areas, budget, the full design team and the client commission are not publicly documented, and no figures beyond those stated above should be inferred.