How this cloud-based Chinese interior design service can more accurately model your ideal home

Getting the keys to a brand new home is just the beginning for many middle-class Chinese home buyers. They typically face months of negotiations with interior designers and builders to decorate and furnish the empty rooms - and some are even enticed by realistic 3D renderings that can show exactly what the finished home will look like.

However, many buyers become impatient because a single change to the design can mean a few more days of rendering, so they end up going with a much faster 2D graphic instead, according to Wu Yue, owner of the North Home Technology design firm in Hangzhou.

“It’s necessary for customers to see the finished render. Otherwise, they can only imagine the final result, which is likely to be very different from the design,” he said.

Stepping in to fill that void is a Hangzhou-based start-up whose three co-founders have used their computer graphics backgrounds to find a way to speed up the process from days to minutes.

Traditional rendering software like 3D Max is slow because it requires a large amount of memory and stores the render files on a computer, said Chen Hang, co-founder and CEO of online design platform Kujiale.com.

To overcome that bottleneck, the Kujiale R&D centre in Hangzhou, China assigns the rendering job to a cluster of more than 3,000 distributed computers and nearly 10,000 virtual servers in the cloud.