Tile Visualization

Our work for Tiles of Lucca, running since 2023, is built around a library of 3D interiors rather than a set of photographs. Each room, whether a bathroom, a shower, a kitchen, a hallway or a dining space, is modelled and lit once, then re-tiled for whichever product needs showing. The same bathroom appears in their portfolio twice, in two completely different schemes.

Building the room turns a new finish into a render rather than a location, a fitter and a week. Several hundred environments later, the set spans glazed zellige checkerboards, fluted terracotta, marble and travertine looks, and large-format limestone.

Three things decide whether a tile render is believed. The format has to sit at its real size on the wall, which is only guaranteed when the room is built to dimension. The joints have to be the width and colour you specify, because grout changes how a whole wall reads. And a glazed tile has to vary from piece to piece, the way real glaze does, or the wall reads as a printed pattern rather than a surface.

That last point is why close-ups matter as much as the room. One Tiles of Lucca frame is a macro of a travertine-look floor at a grazing angle, with shallow focus showing the veining and the fine joint between two slabs.

A tile is rarely sold for one place. The fluted terracotta in the Tiles of Lucca set appears as a bathroom wall lit by low sun and again as a kitchen splashback behind a stainless hob. A large-format travertine look runs down a hallway under an exposed beam ceiling. A limestone-beige floor carries through a dining room to brick arches and steel windows. Showing the same product in several rooms is what lets a buyer picture it in theirs, and with a room library it costs a render per room rather than a shoot per location. Kitchens, where tile meets cabinetry, are covered on our kitchen and cabinetry page.

Because the rooms already exist, a new collection can be laid and lit from its face images and specifications as soon as the designs are final, so the website, the trade catalogue and the launch posts can be ready before stock reaches a showroom. It is the same advantage CGI gives any product still in production, applied to a category where the showroom has always been the bottleneck.

Tile visualiser apps let a shopper photograph their own room and try tiles in it. That is a useful tool, and a different job. What we make is the finished photography of your collection: the hero images for your collection pages, the scenes in your catalogue and the close-ups in your social posts. Many brands use both, and the same tile textures can feed each.