Tilecol at ConstruSul: 3D illusion on a corner LED screen

Tilecol makes mortar, grout and other building products in southern Brazil. Its stand at ConstruSul was a corner stand, and the architect placed two large LED panels on one of the main corners. Panels like these usually just play regular videos. Tilecol wanted something immersive, and the agency in charge of the stand called me to make it.

The idea was to make the two panels look like a single room behind the corner, with the products floating out of it as if they were real objects at the fair. It works like augmented reality, but nobody needs glasses or any device: it is done only with perspective.

The reference they sent me had a problem. Seen from the corner, the top of the room looked right, but the floor did not follow the same perspective, so the illusion broke at the bottom and the product looked distorted.

My challenge was to find out how to make the whole room hold the illusion, so the product would look like an object floating at the fair and not like an image on a screen.

Calculating the distortion

I took the size of both screens in meters and in pixels, the height of the step they stood on and, with the agency, the average distance of the aisle where visitors would walk by. With that I calculated how much distortion the image needed for a person of average height. Seen from too low, too high, too close or too far, it would distort, so I aimed for the middle and made sure it still worked from several distances.

One room, many scenes

Every scene is built on the same base: a cubic room without the front wall, always with the same proportions. What changes from one scene to the next is the border and what is inside. That kept the illusion consistent across all of them.

What each scene would be

They had a script with the scenes they needed and the copy for each one, but not what the scenes would look like. That part was mine, and I tried to put what Tilecol does into the details. In the brand scene, mortar is spread and the tiles are laid until the floor is done. The workshop has a floating race car, because Tilecol sponsors a Stock Car driver. There is a room under construction, with a covered chair and light coming in through the window, a finished room, and the products modeled in 3D, bags and buckets. I used AI only at the start, to generate a simple preview image of each scene and agree on colors and elements with them. After that I modeled every object.

Objects that leave the screen

The 3D texts and products do not just float in place. They move in every direction, rotate and change scale, coming forward and getting bigger until they almost touch the edge of the frame. Each scene has a border that is also 3D and reads as the end of the screen, so when an object passes it, it looks like it is leaving the screen. The stylized backgrounds keep moving the whole time. Everything had to loop with no visible cut, and because the movement is not a simple back and forth, I had to calculate where the loop closes so every element in the scene stays in sync.

Flattened for two screens

I could not just render in Blender and send the file: played on two screens at 90 degrees, it would not work. I flattened the renders and split them into a left and a right part. The file I delivered looks distorted on a flat monitor. On the stand, the angle between the two screens undoes that distortion and the room falls into place.

Post-production

I rendered every element separately so I could treat each one on its own. The reveal animations, the motion icons, the color correction and the cuts were done in post.

The second ConstruSul of 2025 was in Rio Grande do Sul, and for it Tilecol wanted new scenes about the state. The company's owners are from there, and the brand plays with it: Tchêlecol comes from tchê, a word gaúchos use all the time.

The stand had hot water for chimarrão, the mate that gaúchos carry with them literally everywhere, as a way to bring people in. So I built a scene that looks like the place where you would drink it: a barbecue area with the grill going, a wood stove, the bricks at the top of the wall that are typical of the region, and the cuia and bomba (the gourd and the metal straw) with the Tilecol logo. Other scenes have fogo de chão, meat roasting over a fire on the ground, with the countryside behind it, the colors of the state flag and a map of the state.

The feedback I got was that the screen stood out at the fair and drew a lot of attention. For the second ConstruSul they could have reused the same files, and they asked for new scenes instead.

It was my first immersive project of this kind. It is not common for companies in the region to invest in something like this, and Tilecol did.