NEbeton at Designblok 2026 — Showing a material tougher than concrete

For the past few months, we worked on a professional 3D presentation video which was viewed by thousands of people at Prague’s DesignBlok 2026. The NEbeton project was created in collaboration between the platform Innovations by Buřinka, the design studio Balance is Motion and the material manufacturer Cementum.

The visualization serves as a complete showcase of the mixing process, use-case scenarios in interiors, durability testing and goals for future large-scale implementation in house construction.

Mixing the material

In the first part of the video describes the mixing process. After showcasing all the necessary ingredients, we needed to show how the final mixture pours into a “shelf-shaped” form, where it later dries up and solidifies.

To get the material right, we needed reference. We used photos taken during the whole creation process and studied them closely to replicate the same concrete tone and material structure in Blender. We needed to create two variants, the beige and dark grey concrete.

Durability tests

Instead of simulating every fracture and liquid by hand, we crafted realistic still frames using Blender and Photoshop and used them as reference frames for AI video generation. The final outputs were further edited later. This workflow proved to be quite efficient and produced good results right from the start. The hard part was maintaining the visual identity and style throughout the whole video. Still, when compared to traditional methods, using AI proved to be way faster. There were occasional hiccups, as there are with AI, but adjusting the text prompts usually fixed the mistakes or weird decisions it made. For this project we used primarily Seedance 2.5.

Furniture in an interior

The studio Balance is Motion presented NEbeton in the form of concrete shelves that can be stacked on top of each other to form interesting furniture sets. They can be placed in various combinations, used for seating or serve as the foundation for a table. The goal was to present the material in an actual physical object, one which visitors of the booth at DesignBlok could touch.

For us, the important thing was agreeing on how to present these furniture uses. We came up with an interior scene in which different compositions of shelves would assemble, all while a single camera rotates around its own axis. In the end, to save time, we cut together multiple camera angles and scratched the one-take idea.

Another important detail is the mechanism which ties the shelves together. It is made of colored ropes tightened with 3D printed locks.

Behind the scenes

Everything was built, lit and animated in Blender. Here are a few screenshots from the working files.

Designblok 2026

The video was made for a large vertical LED panel inside the NEbeton booth, which you can find in the Designblok 2026 exhibitor listing. We knew beforehand that it would be reused in other marketing materials, so we went with a square 1:1 format and mostly central compositions. This made it much easier to convert the video to other formats later.

For the vertical DesignBlok format, we placed the video higher in the frame, close to eye level, with major headlines right below it. Other valuable statistics are placed directly inside the video, so the renders were framed with enough room for the necessary text.

The video worked very well at the booth, and we were there to witness it ourselves!

— the polygoniq team