Airport stands

Why

Four new stands were planned for an airport hall: a Glandor duty-free shop and a Flypoint coffee bar, lounge and bar. Before anything was built, everyone involved needed to see them as they would really stand, so the renders became the vision the design was agreed on.

That set one hard rule: the pictures had to be pixel-perfect. Every counter, shelf, sofa and sign at its real size, every material and colour as it would be built. A picture that looks right but has the bar a metre too long is worse than no picture.

Why not AI

Image generators are good at mood and bad at measurements. They invent proportions, move things between two views of the same room and quietly change details from one picture to the next. Nothing they draw can be checked against a plan. So these were made the classic way, with no AI anywhere in the process.

How it was made

• Modelled at real scale. Each stand is built in Blender in metres, so a counter is as high as it will be and a camera at 1.6 m sees what a visitor will see.
• Real materials and the brand. Wooden slats, stone counters, steel shelving, plants, the neon signs and each brand’s logo and colours.
• Lit like the hall. Daylight from the terminal windows plus the stands’ own lights: pendant bulbs, under-counter strips and lit shelves.
• Cameras for every question. Eye-level views of the fronts and counters, close views of the details, and a view from above that shows the whole layout.
• Rendered, not painted. Every frame is path-traced in Cycles on the GPU, at full HD.

Result

A set of renders per stand that showed exactly what would be built, from the front, from inside and from above, before the first panel was cut.