I work as a concept designer for a company called Premier Lift group in the UK. I have been using blender for almost 2 years to visualise concepts and support design development with our manufacturing partners on projects for luxury properties and spaces primarily in London.
What began as a personal project during lockdown, learning to use webflow to build websites, morphed into creating a completely new visual identity for the company I work for.
Following the growing trend of modern web design that has an emphasis on 3D visuals to help navigation through selective colours and short looped video animations, I was able to create a completely new website and brochures that better represents our identity. At the same time I wanted to create a video animation that showed off our entire range and the sectors we work in to support marketing the company’s first impression.
The combination of the advancements in blender builds and the constant updates of the e-cycles and the denoiser meant I was able to create more than 150 still visuals for the site and brochures. The animations also take no longer than 30 seconds per frame. The still images are rendered at a resolution of 4500px wide with a low sample count roughly 64-128, I found that using such a high resolution helps the denoiser pick up details and I then downsampled and colour corrected in lightroom.
It would be great to get any feedback from the community! It’s been a long 7 months getting this live but I am very glad I made the switch from unreal engine 2 years ago.
Thank you! From all different places really, many from were from models that I liked from dimensivia and 3D sky I would then create variations of them in the node editor to suit the space.
Some of the more outdoor materials came from quixel and I used the bridge to link them into blender.
That looks amazing I’m not an expert at all, but the scenes feel so realistic. I thought such a video would take an enormous amount of effort not really doable by one person. Guess I’m wrong, probably the availability of ready high-qualiity assets is the main work-saving part here?
There is just one scene that doesn’t feel right to me, the car scene. But I can’t certainly say what it is. Maybe the surfaces (car, wall, garage: especially the lit door) ares are too smooth. Maybe the garage lifts too fast in my perception. Even if that’s real, it doesn’t feel like that. And if the trees and leaves would move a bit that probably would help.
Thank you! I actually come from a product design background with 10 years experience so I model rooms and lift designs in solid works they are colour blocked and imported into blender and have colours and materials ready to replace in a custom template file, its an unusual workflow but it helps me create scenes with accuracy and speed with what I am familiar with. Some of the heavier CAD files I used the fantastic STEPper importer by @ambi.
It was 7 months to do the website/brochures/animation. So it was still quite a bit of time, as more scenes are created I started building favorite materials that I reuse and slightly edit in the node editor changing detail, colour etc. Furniture is primarily from the site dimensivia, I always greyscale the textures and customise them to suit the scene hue/saturation node & mixRGB node is used on pretty much every texture I use.
I have to agree with the car scene, with it also being a dark with not many points of direct light it doesn’t help the materials. As for the trees one of my 2021 visualisation goals is to focus much more on nature and correctly animating it.
As mentioned in the description the latest optix updates and the use of e-cycles for the render made some of the frames to render time as low as 10 seconds at 1080p (2080ti). When importing heavy CAD data last year CUDA had huge build times with that now reduced down to almost nothing on optix.
I’m not an expert at all, but the scenes feel so realistic. I thought such a video would take an enormous amount of effort not really doable by one person. Guess I’m wrong, probably the availability of ready high-qualiity assets is the main work-saving part here?