Behind The Scenes: Casio G-Shock MT-G B-1000

My name is Bernard Wong, I am a Hong Kong Based self-taught 3D Generalist/Marketer with a strong focus on Product Visualization because I want to combine my marketing background with various 3D skills that I have learned over the years.

Besides clients’ projects, I also do personal projects like this one for my portfolio.

Inspiration

I was shopping at a mall in Hong Kong and I saw this big G-Shock banner ad. I couldn’t stop thinking about how I would approach it. I got so inspired and the only way to get it off my mind was to just do it. It was a challenge for myself.

Softwares I Used

I created the model in Blender, rendered with Cycles and post-processed in Photoshop.

Reference

I gathered most of the references off of various websites, for example, the Casio main site, a watch review site, a few videos, and Google images. I wanted to get a good all-around look at the watch before modelling it.

Modeling

I usually don’t start until I have mapped out most of the process in my head. I model the biggest piece first and work my way down, biggest to smallest, outer to inner. Below is an exploded view of the model.

Wireframe of the watch.

Texture

I created all of the texture maps in Photoshop (Diffuse, Normal map, Displacement map, Roughness map).

I also created a custom radial brushed metal texture because I was unable to find any good ones online.

For the fonts, I took some time to look for some free ones online that look similar to the one they use on the actual watch. They are close enough.

Material

I used the built-in principled shader, plugging in different textures that I made and some procedural textures such as noise, voronoi or musgrave where I saw fit.

Below is the screencap of one of the node setups for the main material.

Lighting Setup & Rendering

I used a few emissive planes with a gradient texture and a few point lamps for the highlight on the chrome bezel.

I created multiple renderings with different lighting and layered them in Photoshop.

To layer them up, I loaded them into the stack and changed the layer blending mode from normal to lighten.

Then I created a mask and masked out the parts that I didn't like or masked in the ones I did like.

Below is what I mean by multiple renderings.

Below are some of the finished renders with the same concept.

Below is a little animation of the watch I made:

About the Author

Bernard Wong, 3D Generalist