Celebrity Xcel Bazaar
Architectural Animations Present Celebrity Cruises’ Onboard Experience
A major innovation
The Bazaar is Celebrity Cruises’ groundbreaking new concept being introduced for the first time on Celebrity Xcel, a luxury cruise liner from Royal Caribbean Group. This multi-story, multi-sensory space serves as the epicenter of onboard experiences, designed to merge land and sea adventures by bringing destinations directly onboard.
Celebrity Cruises, known for its innovative Magic Carpet feature, is launching its next major innovation with the Bazaar. The concept allows guests to continue their destination experiences while onboard, offering authentic immersion in the sights, sounds, flavors, and traditions of the places they visit, including the festivals that have made those destinations famous.
Unlike land-based hospitality, these interiors exist in constant motion, with shifting daylight, changing horizons, and itineraries that alter the mood from one country to the next. For ZOA Studio, tasked with creating the project’s animations, the challenge lay in showing not just the architecture, but the operational reality of a venue at sea.
A single guest journey
The look and feel of each scene needed to align with the market—no formal tuxedos, no casual sportswear. Clothing, posture, and movement all needed to convey a sense of relaxed exclusivity.
The Bazaar’s defining feature is its ability to reflect each destination Celebrity Xcel visits. When docked in Brazil, the spaces transform with samba-bright colours and patterns; in Europe, textures and tones shift to reflect local culture and artistic traditions, ensuring guests experience genuine destination immersion even while onboard. These shifts involved not just colour palettes but also market items changing to match the location, wallpaper patterns being swapped out, and large LED light screens displaying new region-specific imagery.
Our task was to make these thematic changes believable, with lighting, décor, and digital displays that responded naturally to each new setting. The spaces themselves were varied: a compact market lined with display tables and regional goods; the red-lit Portal linking the outer decks to the main dining areas; and two levels of restaurants, from the more casual upper space to the fine-dining venue with its open kitchen. The intention was to show these rooms as part of a single guest journey, with consistent visual logic across every camera move.
Crowd simulation
Crowd simulation was at the core of this task. High densities were needed in nearly every scene, with guests walking, talking, or interacting in ways that felt spontaneous, and with a clear diversity of appearances and styles to reflect the cruise ship’s international clientele. Using Anima, our Lead CG Artist, Samer, together with Dani and Mo, had to manage pathfinding, avoid model repetition, and choreograph entrances and exits so that there were no empty frames. As Samer put it, “It’s like in a real movie, trying to use the actors. We are literally moving the characters so they fit perfectly. There’s no space empty, there’s always someone walking, there’s always someone doing something.” The whole process is “a Lego play for elders.”
This was compounded by the need to keep human movement from interfering with key architectural views, all while keeping the model and file sizes within workable limits. In practical terms, some setups could only be previewed as low-detail cubes to avoid crashes, meaning final positioning only became clear after hours of rendering—a common reality for any visualization studio delivering ultra-realistic animated scenes.
Live performers appeared
Live-action dancers were added to the evening scenes via green screen, shot by a separate production unit. To ensure these elements integrated seamlessly, ZOA supplied panoramic lighting references, camera and light data, and detailed floor plans marking the exact position and colour of each light source. This level of documentation allowed the production team to match our 3D environment precisely, ensuring the live performers appeared as if they were part of the original space—an approach that sets top visualization companies apart.
Lighting was perhaps the most complex technical element. The client wanted sequences to show a full shift from sunset to moonlight, with interiors transitioning from the warm ambience of dinner service to the dynamic effects of a nightclub. Balancing interior and exterior exposure was challenging, especially when the brief called for both the setting sun and the moon to be visible in the same frame. Multiple render passes were produced for each light source, allowing for detailed adjustments in post-production. This approach gave the flexibility to meet the client’s visual demands while preserving a level of realism expected from the best architectural visualization studios.
Rendering times also reflected the project’s complexity. Depending on the camera angle and lighting conditions, individual frames took between fifteen and sixty minutes to render. With 25 frames per second, even short sequences represented many hours of processing. Late-stage issues, such as characters clipping into furniture or colliding with other guests, were fixed through minor timing adjustments or subtle repositioning. As Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.” The challenges, from software limitations to managing vast animated crowds, ultimately sharpened the team’s technical abilities.
Guiding the viewer’s eye
Each shot was designed to work both as part of the animation and as a standalone image, guiding the viewer’s eye toward the architecture without letting the crowd overwhelm the frame. Interactions were planned so that they appeared natural yet supported the main story.
The final animations present the Bazaar as a sequence of distinct yet connected spaces, each calibrated for a specific phase of the day and a specific audience. The transitions from day to night, the thematic changes tied to location, and the carefully orchestrated crowd scenes combine to create a convincing portrait of life on board, realizing Celebrity Cruises’ vision of bringing destinations onboard Celebrity Xcel, where the journey becomes as authentic as the destinations themselves.
For us, the project with Brothership was an exercise in precision—a demonstration of how technical control, accurate context, and visual consistency can make a complex environment feel both realistic and cool—qualities that define a render company delivering architectural animations at the highest level.
Project details
Client
Celebrity Cruises
Royal Caribbean Group
Ship
Celebrity Xcel
Partner
Team
Samer Saniour
Dániel Oláh
Mohamed Atef
