MRL Elevator Platform
Product Visualization for Vertical Transportation
A button, a door, and a brief moment of transit
When the first automated elevator button was introduced in 1892, the technology worked flawlessly. Engineers had solved every mechanical problem. Industry journals assured readers it was perfectly safe. Yet for fifty years, nobody wanted to ride without a human operator inside. The issue was never the engineering, it was psychology. As Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, puts it: “trust grows at the speed of a coconut tree and falls at the speed of a coconut.”
More than a century later, elevators remain among the most essential yet invisible components of the built environment. We experience them as an interface, a button, a door, a brief moment of transit, but rarely as an object with hundreds of precisely coordinated parts working behind four concrete walls. This gap between engineering sophistication and human understanding is exactly where product visualization becomes something more than renders.
Our recent product animation project for a global elevator manufacturer’s system demonstrates what happens when a visualization studio approaches industrial equipment with the same rigor and restraint typically reserved for buildings by Zaha Hadid or Snøhetta. The nearly three-minute film transforms a product that lives permanently hidden inside shafts into something comprehensible, elegant, and trustworthy.
Elevator visualization demands a different approach
Product visualization operates under a fundamentally different set of pressures than architectural animation. When you render a building, you have context: the site, the surrounding urban fabric, the landscape, the scale cues that help viewers orient themselves in space.
An elevator has none of this.
A machine-room-less elevator exists inside a vertical concrete box. Everything that makes the system work is tucked behind panels, inside cabinets, or distributed across components most building occupants will never see. The visualization challenge is not to make the product look good, but to reveal how it functions without losing the viewer in technical complexity.
“When you’re rendering something from half a meter away, every detail counts, every highlight matters,” notes Botond Sass, ZOA’s Lead CG Artist, in one of our latest posts. The storyboard for this project reflects that proximity. The film is organized as a series of thematic chapters: minimized building interfaces, schedule optimization, digitalization, sustainability. Each section addresses a distinct value proposition, and each requires its own visual strategy.
This structure emerged from client conversations that went beyond typical briefings. Learning how an elevator actually operates at the mechanism level, which gears drive which components, how door panels slide along their tracks, what happens when the car responds to a sudden load, required sustained technical dialogue with engineers, brand managers, and product specialists. Meetings regularly involved eight to ten stakeholders from the client side, a density of expertise that would be unusual for most architectural projects but was essential here.
How CAD models become cinematic
The prep work for the elevator animation consumed a disproportionate share of the production timeline. Manufacturing-grade CAD models require extensive cleanup, rigging, and behavior logic so that complex assemblies can be animated reliably. For the door mechanism alone, the studio built a system where a single slider parameter drives an entire chain of movements: panels, rollers, cables, and safety interlocks all respond in sequence.
In product visualization, precision is visible. If a bolt lands two millimeters off its target, it shows. Animation can sometimes hide imprecision behind atmospheric effects or distance; product animation offers no such refuge.
Our team solved the hoistway’s opacity problem with a recurring visual device: replacing the concrete walls with a transparent glass proxy. This allows viewers to see inside the shaft while maintaining spatial context. Other secondary effects appear throughout the film: synchronized infographics that move with animated components, UI elements on the elevator’s displays, and a recurring light motif drawn from the manufacturer’s brand identity. These elements do not appear in every shot, but their periodic presence keeps the film dynamic.
The team, two 3D artists handling scene work, plus dedicated motion graphics and editorial support, split the production by sequence, each artist owning specific sections while maintaining file compatibility across the project. That was a constant management concern. When you are working at the level of individual fasteners and cable routings, even small inconsistencies between artist files can create visible discontinuities in the final render.
Product animation as internal communication
The animation was originally conceived as an internal communication tool, training material for staff who interact with the brand but not with the product’s technical details. The most sophisticated product visualization is increasingly serving not just marketing or sales, but organizational knowledge: helping large companies understand their own offerings.
For architectural visualization studios, this represents a meaningful expansion of scope. The skills that make a studio capable of rendering a Stefano Boeri project, material fidelity, compositional intelligence, narrative pacing, translate directly to industrial products, but with higher demands on technical accuracy and client collaboration. The relationship built through this project subsequently led to additional work for the manufacturer’s European division, suggesting that quality visualization creates its own demand.
The counterintuitive insight here is that the most technical projects often require the most creative solutions. An elevator is not inherently photogenic. Its value is functional, not sculptural. Making that function visible, and making it feel trustworthy, requires visual storytelling that most product photography or technical illustration cannot achieve. The camera movements in the film, the timing of the assembly sequences, the decision to let the sustainability section conclude with the ambient sounds of a forest, these are authorial choices, not technical defaults.
Product visualization is becoming part of the design communication process, not just the end of it. For products that live behind walls, inside shafts, or beneath floors, this shift may matter even more than for buildings. If people cannot see what you have made, they cannot understand it. And if they cannot understand it, as the elevator operators of 1892 learned, they cannot trust it.
Project details
Team
Róbert Andrékó
Dani Oláh
Ilus Varga
Services
Creative Concept
Storyboard
Product Visualization
Product Animation