I didn't see that coming - as it turns out, IKEA uses CG on the majority of their product images.
Every year, CGSociety goes to SIGGRAPH, one of the premier conferences on innovation for the computer graphics and VFX industries in the world. In 2012, we watched as Martin Enthed, the IT Manager for the in-house communication agency of IKEA, gave a short presentation. He told us how their visualisation team had evolved from the use of traditional photography for the IKEA catalogue to a system today, where the bulk of its imagery is CG. I remember leaving the auditorium (which was packed) thinking, “Those natural-looking photographs in the IKEA catalogues are amazing. I can’t believe they're mostly CG. It’s incredible.” It was such a great presentation that we went and saw it again in 2013 when it was an official talk, and figured you guys might like to know how IKEA did it - what they had to build and innovate to get their still images to look so real. So we made a time to catch up with Martin, and asked him how and why IKEA decided to make the leap from traditional to digital.
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"This is one of the reasons we use Max because it has an option for real-world scale on the mapping. I would love to be able to model in even more detail maybe even to the molecule level!"
Is this possible in blender?
Well, change to metric system and you have a real-world scale.
Yup, real world scale is quite easy...
ahhhhh I should have been more clear. I meant a metric system in the UV editor
Blender has very good real-world scale. Its a great software with amazing capabilities. But it is missing the real-world scale in uv-mapping..
e.g. If i want to assign a brick mapping to a group of walls I will use cube projection mapping. but that is not real scale. There is option for cube size but that works opposite. The higher the number the smaller becomes the bricks.. For the last couple of years I have been using Blender for Architectural visualizations. I always have to use other clue to check for the mapping sizes. There are 2 main things I miss in blender for architectural work. 1) Real-world scale mapping 2) multiple object editing.
Hi. Have you checked the MultiEdit addon? Maybe you'll find it useful:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?339369-MultiEdit-%28alpha-1%29-Multiple-Objects-Editing!
Thanks for Sharing that.. Didnt know that such addon existed.. This addon will surely speedup my workflow by huge margins.. :)
Just found this other amazing addon, and immediately remembered this discussion:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?236631-Addon-Simple-Box-UVW-Map-Modifier
As I've mentioned at the thread, to keep the original proportions, use this at "Texture squash":
(height/width) * (-1) +2
This doesn't surprise me, I work for a furniture company, a year ago they moved to entirely 3D rendered images for their marketing, and I've been recreating every one of their products in Blender/Cycles. It cost them a lot of money before and took a long time to have each products photographed. Now I can produce a render for them quick enough for their clients to see a preview of what the custom made office furniture will look like in an hour, sometimes less.
Using 3D rendered images for furniture companies means you can get photos of the products sooner for less cost.
ahhhhh I should have been more clear in the metric system in the UV editor
The marketing guys where I work recently wanted a catalogue front cover image showing a diverse range of products. They always use(d) photography, but since one of the new products hadn't even been built yet, it couldn't be photographed. I sent them a Cycles mock-up and they were instantly hooked. It saved them a fortune in shipping, photography, and Photoshop-ing fake shadows onto everything, and achieved the photographic impossibility of advertising a product before it existed.
Been a long time since I've played with Max, but I remember real-world size mapping:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS4WXGUusjg
Basically, you get a "Use Real World Scale" checkbox. Turn it on and the 'tiling' option (equal to 'Scale' found at the Mapping node) will be replaced by "Size". Then you specify the size the texture should be rendered.
It will consider the object dimensions and texture size, do all the math and presto!, you only have to adjust the offset value (similar to Location in Blender).
I was tasked with recording video of some of the fans in our store & after finding the lighting and cluttered surroundings inadequate for such a video, I decided to just build the fan in Blender. 3-hour task, and the boss was impressed. "How did you do that?" Heh. I expect to have a few that'll take just one hour.
I think IKEA products would be especially easy to model. Most of their products consist solely of flat surfaces, so it's an easy choice with today's technology. Shelves would be finished in minutes.