From traditional sports venues to backyard extravaganza, modern-day swimming pools showcase a surprising versatility of designs. Just look at this stylish indoor pool nested in the Maryland woods or this dreamy pool terrace with clean geometry, surrounded by hardscape.

Indoors or outdoors, secluded or showy, a swimming pool serves an ambiguous purpose. It’s an amenity most associated with the rich and famous but still a beloved feature with magnetic appeal. Who could resist the peace and quiet of a sunkissed lounge by the still water?

Ever popular, pools are becoming a more frequent subject in photorealistic imagery. Here’s why visualization is the next big thing in swimming pool design.

Visualization makes it easy to understand the project scope.

This statement is true for any project but is especially important in design-oriented fields.

Throughout the rest of this article, we’ll see time and time again that swimming pool design is far more complex than non-designers might think. It’s astounding how much detail goes into making the plainest vessel, but that’s not all. Pool mechanics is also hard to understand.

That is where 3D rendering is essential to both designers and clients.

When it comes to the project scope, photorealistic imagery answers the burning questions, such as “When will the pool be finished?” and “How much will it cost?” Every client is interested in at least one of these questions. Without photorealistic predictions, designers themselves don’t have all the details.

A 3D rendering shows a clear picture of the design by making the complexity less overwhelming. In the case of overly intricate and ambitious projects, it preemptively saves a lot of time and money. Since it’s highly accurate, a 3D rendering can also serve as a blueprint for the building.

It helps people see and understand the finished design.

In addition to scale, proportion, and balance, swimming pool designers must take a lot of other variables into consideration. Sometimes, clients raise the level of difficulty by commissioning inconceivable water features or proposing ideas of their own that would defy the laws of physics.

It’s a designer’s job to navigate clients’ wishes to the best possible outcome.

Photorealistic imagery is of significant help in situations when clients’ demands are impossible to meet. It gives an upper hand to a designer, as something to show to the client at the next meeting. 3D rendering is crucial for communicating overly abstract or too technical ideas.

Seeing an image of a 3D model, clients can fully grasp the finished design. That is of crucial importance for the future of any building project, given that any miscommunication between the designer and the client can end up costing them a lot of time and money.

Visualization makes it easy to test out different ideas.

Some clients are extremely serious about their water features and other specific ideas that sometimes don’t work with a particular design. A 3D render of a finished swimming pool can show them why they are wrong and how they can design it differently.

Testing out ideas is a significant advantage of photorealistic visualization.

Even designers themselves can benefit from rendering their visions as a way to solve a dilemma or make a hard decision. For instance, it takes a keen eye and plenty of experience to choose between clean geometry and free-form. Make one wrong choice, and you could compromise the design.

In any application, 3D rendering promotes brainstorming and streamlines the exchange of ideas. That also makes it a fantastic tool for collaboration and teamwork. It allows designers to hone their skills and collaborate with engineers and mechanics simultaneously and in real-time.

It’s easier to understand landscaping and other elements.

Swimming pool design follows the same set of principles as architecture, interior decoration, or landscape design, to name a few. Scale, proportion, and balance are merely some of these subfields’ elements that a pool designer must consider.

We’ve already tackled the water features a couple of times, which require adequately designed hydraulics and sound control in addition to the esthetic appeal. All these elements must create a seamless effect between the swimming pool and its surroundings.

Landscaping plays another critical role here.

In the render above, the pool is only a clean surface that serves to reflect the greenery. It is a unique example of how landscaping can complement the minimalist pool design. At the same time, it reveals the distinctively chameleon nature of swimming pool design.

3D rendering helps you recognize mistakes before it’s too late.

Structural design, mechanical design or hydraulics, and esthetic design are the three equally important facets of swimming pool architecture. In between the three of them, there’s a lot of space for potential mistakes. Not even experienced designers can foresee and prevent all of them.

Luckily, 3D rendering provides damage control in real-time, with no actual damage.

Everything that might go wrong once the building starts can be seen on the render, which gives designers the superpower to model flawless swimming pools. That applies to all three aspects we’ve mentioned above and is of particular significance in hydraulics.

A good designer might be able to fix a cosmetic flaw on a finished pool, but mechanical mistakes are something else. Many of them are irreversible once the building is done. If you don’t discover them in time, structural and mechanical flaws can also be damaging and dangerous.

Conclusion

A swimming pool is more than a concrete vessel. Among all other things, it’s a multifaceted oasis for centering one’s emotions.

There’s an old rule for designing swimming pools serving as a reminder that functionality isn’t the only essential aspect of pool design. They are not only for swimming; some owners never swim in their pools. They are pleasant to look at and ideal to play with and relax on a sunny day.

A swimming pool needs to reflect its surroundings and, by extension, its owner.

This mirror-like esthetic quality might be the most difficult to achieve. However, for every challenge in design, visualization provides a blank canvas with no actual consequences. In 3D rendering, ideas and solutions are infinite, limited only by the building laws waiting to realize them.