How Morevi Studio built a fully explorable resort island in real time with V-Ray, Vantage, and Cosmos

Summary:

• Levan Kalandia is an architectural visualization specialist and co-founder of Morevi Studio in Georgia.
• The studio was asked to visualize Ambassadori Island Batumi, an artificial island and hotel development planned for the coastline of Batumi, Georgia.
• Due to the scale and ever-evolving nature of the project, Levan committed to an unusual plan to model the entire city and island and to explore them as a single, real-time, ray-traced environment in 3ds Max using V-Ray, Vantage, and Cosmos.
• The result was a real-time environment that the team could navigate from the city, sea, or air, producing stills and animations for presentations and marketing.

During his 15 years in archviz, Levan Kalandia has steadily raised the bar, moving away from traditional rendering into more cinematic, high-fidelity architectural presentations. Through his studio, Morevi Studio, the Georgia-based artist works on luxury real estate, hospitality, urban spaces, and large masterplan projects.

Throughout his time in the industry, Chaos tools have always been a part of his practice. “I've been using Chaos products for 15 years, and they've become the keystone of my creative and professional workflow," he says.

It was V-Ray’s combination of photorealistic quality, creative freedom, and technical power that first drew him in, with tools like Vantage and Cosmos being added over the years to accelerate workflow and amplify his projects.

Ambassadori Island Batumi pushed that workflow further than any previous project. With ever-changing designs and requirements and a project on an enormous scale, Levan needed to take a different approach to achieve the best results, choosing a real-time pipeline over conventional methods.

The problem: a city-scale scene that never stopped changing

Ambassadori Island Batumi is one of the most ambitious developments underway in Batumi, a Black Sea resort city on Georgia's west coast. The project involves an artificial island and large-scale architecture, including a hotel and urban development in a single 84-hectare waterfront vision. Levan has been involved in the project since the early stages and is responsible for the architectural visualization and overall visual presentation of the project—a scope that has continually widened as the development has matured.

The brief Levan received for the project carried a specific design constraint: the island could not feel detached from the city. "One of the most important design guidelines was that the island should not feel like a separate entity, disconnected from the city," Levan explains. Instead, it needed to read as a natural extension of Batumi while holding its own identity, connected through a shared architectural language, scale, and atmosphere, and convincingly tied to the sea, coastline, and existing skyline.

That guideline created the central technical obstacle, since selling the connection between island and city meant building both. "The environment's massive scale and complexity posed the greatest challenge," Levan says. "The project included not only the island itself, but also broad areas of Batumi, the coastline, marine environment, infrastructure, vegetation, lighting, and urban context."

A second pressure ran alongside the first: the design kept evolving. New materials, animations, and presentation content were needed at different stages, so the pipeline had to absorb constant updates and quick creative decisions without sacrificing visual quality. Holding those two demands together—total scale and constant change—is where the Chaos toolset earned its place.

The solution: one real-time environment, built entirely in 3ds Max

Early on, Levan made a decision that would shape the entire project. Rather than producing isolated island renders against static photographic or matte backgrounds, the team would model the full Batumi environment and treat it as a true real-time architectural space inside Vantage. Static backdrops were ruled out deliberately because they limit camera movement, composition, and exploration—the same qualities the project needed to communicate scale.

It was an incredibly bold decision. "The idea was quite risky given the massive scale of the project, seeming realistically impossible," Levan says. In fact, it was the type of work typically associated with game engines. The team couldn’t be sure whether Vantage would handle a project this large with ray tracing inside a classic archviz workflow. Levan recalls weighing up the decision. “If it failed, we could lose several months of work, as modeling of this scale alone took 2-3 months.”

To keep the build manageable, the scene was split in two. The city of Batumi and its surroundings were modeled separately. Key buildings, the boulevard, roads, thousands of cars, and infrastructure were modeled out, and the forested mountains were populated using Chaos Scatter. The island and its coastal area were created separately, and the two halves were combined into a single environment.

The pipeline ran on 3ds Max, V-Ray, Vantage, and Cosmos, each handling a distinct job. V-Ray supplied the photorealistic foundation: materials, lighting, atmosphere, reflections, water, and glass. Its lighting and material system remains Levan's most-used feature for precisely this kind of work. "It offers utmost realism and control, especially when working with atmospheric architectural scenes, reflections, glass, water, and complex lighting," he explains.

Cosmos accelerated the part of the job that scale makes punishing—filling a believable environment with high-quality assets and materials, while V-Ray Proxy and other optimization methods prepared the enormous volume of geometry for Vantage.

Vantage is where the workflow changed character. Working between V-Ray and Vantage, the team continuously tested the combined scene, and time after time, it did exactly what was asked. "Vantage was able to reliably handle this massive project, even with atmospheric effects, fog, aerial perspective, displacement materials, vegetation scatter, reflections, cinematic camera effects, depth of field, and volumetric clouds."

Real-time scene exploration with true ray tracing is Levan's favorite Vantage feature, and on a project this size, it removed the guesswork from creative decisions. "You no longer imagine what the final shot will look like—you immediately see and feel the lighting, reflections, atmosphere, and composition right in the scene."

And camera work benefited just as much. Building and testing animation inside Vantage lets the team explore movement, speed, and cinematic transitions in real time without committing to long render iterations to find out whether a shot worked.

The results: a navigable future city, delivered with room to create

The pipeline produced more than a collection of finished frames. "We ended up with not just a set of pre-made shots, but a fully-fledged architectural environment that could be explored in real time, almost like a real city," Levan says.

The team could search for new angles and check composition, lighting, HDRI, atmosphere, weather, and camera movement directly in the scene, without waiting on long render passes—a level of creativity that would not have been possible with a more limited static-background approach.

That output fed every stage of the development's communication. Images and animations were used for presentations, marketing materials, social media content, and the project's overall visual identity. Because the project frequently changed, the visualization moved beyond a mere means of presenting the design; it became a working tool for exploring the island's future atmosphere and its relationship to Batumi.

The animations were especially impactful, conveying the scale and ambition of the development through cinematic camera movement and large-scale environmental shots. Throughout it all, Vantage's real-time workflow let the team generate that volume of content efficiently while maintaining high quality.

For Levan, the most significant change was to the creative process itself. "I could think less about technical limitations and focus more on composition, atmosphere, camera movement, animation, and storytelling."

He points to the project as evidence of what the Chaos ecosystem can do when artists use its tools together: V-Ray for a photorealistic base, Cosmos to enrich the environment, and Vantage for real-time exploration.

It also shapes how he sees the discipline developing—a strong 3D foundation, real-time ray-traced exploration, and cinematic presentation, supported by intelligent tools that help artists "tell architectural stories with speed and soul."

“At some point, the work began to feel less like a classic rendering workflow and more like a true exploration of a future architectural space. What impressed me most was that it all worked directly within 3ds Max and the Chaos ecosystem, without switching to game engines.”

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