Hey guys I plan on revisiting this model I made this render in Blender, a year ago I tried to uv map a brand image and information onto it but the problem is that I couldn’t find a website that had free brand images for products. I know I can just make the brand images myself but I don’t want to do that as it will take too long plus when I made this I was still learning how to use Blender and finding out what I wanted to use Blender for in the future. If anyone knows a website that has brand images that you can use for free please tell.
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The thing about brand images is… they’re branded… they have specific guidelines and licensing for their use. It’s quite rare for it to be safe for you to use brand images- you need written permission, technically, and you have to follow their branding guidelines and trademarks.
Now, truth be told, you can do whatever you want. You can grab brand logos off of Google and slap them on stuff, and 99% of the time, you’ll be fine. However, if that brand notices, they can and will take legal action against you, and you’ll be buried in a landslide of crippling legal fees. Trust me, big companies have nearly unlimited legal resources, and their usual strategy is just to wait for whoever they’re suing to go bankrupt and then settle. So, tread with caution when using logos.
You could argue fair use on any given logo, since you’re presumably not making these images commercial (if you are, you need to seriously reconsider your whole plan right now), but fair use isn’t permission, it’s just a defense against losing your house and your car and everything else in the legal battle. You’re still liable, just not as much (and with directly trademarked stuff, you won’t find a judge that will grant you fair use anyway)
What should you do, then? You should get written permission from the companies whose logos you want to use, and pay the licensing fees. That, or you can just grab stuff from Google and hope no one notices. And they usually don’t, you’ll almost certainly be fine. But if they notice, you will lose a lot of money at the very least
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To clarify- you can make a model of a Ferrari or a Sephora perfume bottle or even something super iconic like a glass Coca-Cola bottle and not worry. As soon as you put a logo on any of those, you’re now in actionable territory. It’s why cereal boxes in TV shows always have the back side facing the camera, or why Apple computers have the logo photoshopped off in stock images. Logos are big, flashing red siren, danger areas for creatives
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Okay the risk is not worth the reward. Thanks for the advice josephhansen
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Indeed but it’s also because it’s part of a commercial product ( the movie / tv show) .
To give my take on the answer, I’m not sure you’ll find what you’re looking for, at least something like https://www.the-blueprints.com/ but for packaging.
But I didn’t search for that, so who knows…
These are interesting to work with, since in general you are given different areas to be printed in vector format. You can use that to make parts of the packaging more or less shiny, metallic, or do an emboss for instance.
All these are difficult to make from a photo you can take yourself. But it’s always possible to retrace it …
About legal uses, I’m not as extreme as @joseph, but he is probably right for sure !
It really depends on the context in which it’s displayed. If it’s something you do as an exercise, you put that in your portfolio to look for clients and you state that this is an exercise of your own then you should be fine.
I’m sure a lot of people modeling cars face similar situation and they are fine.
But it’s a gray area for sure, the more exposure you make, the more close to something commercial you get, the greater chances you have to get some troubles.
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