Zyplab Living: a smart home you control
An apartment that draws itself in pencil, fills with sunlight, then hands you the lights: scenes, dimmers, blinds and the time of day, all from a phone.
The hard part
Real light you can change live. Every lighting circuit is rendered separately and mixed in the browser in linear light, so a dimmer at 55% looks exactly like a render at 55%, not like a filter.
Measured
- Rendered states
- 11 times of day and blind positions
- Scenes
- Day, Golden hour, Dinner, Movie, City night, Away
- Colour accuracy
- Within 1.25% of Blender's own output
- Dynamic range
- 16 stops, log-encoded atlases
Taken on the live build, 1440×900, cold cache. Reproduce them yourself.
How we built it
From a blank file to live, in 5 stages.
The Freestyle line pass: 72 frames of the same camera. 1A pencil drawing that draws itself
The brief was an architect's line drawing that becomes a photograph. We rendered the room's own camera as a Freestyle line pass, 72 frames long, so the sketch builds itself as you scroll.
Mid-scroll on the live site: sketch on the left, render on the right. 2The photo pours in
Then the materials and the sunlight wash over the drawing. The set reuses The Halden's Residence 9C, with a media wall, motorised blinds and LED cove strips added for this build.
Blinds closed at 6 pm: the room lit by its own fittings. 3Every light on its own channel
Instead of rendering finished scenes, we rendered each circuit separately: sun, pendants, lamps, LED strips, downlights and the screen, across 11 times of day and blind positions, stored as 16-stop log-encoded atlases.
9 pm, blinds open, the city lit behind the glass. 4Noon to midnight
The time slider moves between real renders, from noon sun across the floor to the city glowing at night. Nothing is faked with a colour filter.
zyplab-living.vercel.app: scenes, time, blinds, dimmers, LED colour. 5The browser becomes the dimmer
A WebGL2 mixer adds the light layers in linear space and tone-maps them with an AgX fit that lands within 1.25% of Blender's own output. On a phone the controls fold into a bottom sheet.
Zyplab Living is our demo for smart-home integrators, interior designers and lighting brands. The visitor scrolls and the room draws itself as an architect's pencil sketch; then the materials and the sun pour in, and the controls are theirs: six scenes, a time-of-day slider from noon to midnight, blinds, the screen, four dimmers, LED colour and downlight colour temperature. Every state is a real render. The browser only mixes the light.
More of the hard parts.
All work
The Halden: a photoreal launch site
A launch site for a fictional Brooklyn tower: scroll from the street to Residence 9C, then watch the sun set behind the glass.
VARNIKA: a skincare launch film
A 20-second launch film for VARNIKA, a skincare line we designed and built end to end in 3D: a rose serum, a night cream and one continuous shot.