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Product rendering

A module on making a thing that does not exist look like a photograph of a thing that does. Existing products — a glass kettle, a torch, a turned bowl — modelled and rendered until the glass, the brushed metal and the contact shadow stopped giving it away.

DISCIPLINE
Other
YEAR
2019
MADE WITH
3D modelling and rendering · studio lighting setups
CURRENT STATE
—
A Breville-style product poster: the glass kettle on a kitchen counter under the Breville logo and the headline Elegant and efficient kettle with Dura Glass.
The render placed where it was always going: a reconstruction of a Breville product poster, built to find out whether the kettle would survive next to real photography. The copy and the model number are the manufacturer’s.

// Why this exists

The companion to drawing by hand. Where the visualisation module taught what light does, this one taught how to make software do it — and the honest framing matters here: these are renderings of products that already exist, built to learn the craft. None of these objects is my design, and the exercise was never to invent one.

A photoreal render of a glass electric kettle with a wooden base and a dark handle, lit in a white studio.
The render on its own. Glass fails in three ways at once — refraction through the body, a caustic under it, and a matte wood base that has to stay matte in the same frame.
A second poster layout with the kettle on a white desk beside a framed print and a plant.
The other layout, with the kettle small in a room rather than filling the frame.

// What actually happened

Model the object from reference, then spend most of the time on everything that is not the object: the lighting rig, the material definitions, the ground plane, the falloff of the shadow. A glass kettle is the useful test case because it fails in three ways at once — refraction through the body, a caustic on the surface under it, and a wood base that has to read as matte in the same frame.

A conical black torch with a green ring, rendered on white with a soft contact shadow.
The torch. Brushed dark plastic, a machined bezel and one green line to stop it reading as a lump.

// What was delivered

Two poster layouts rebuilt around the kettle render, plus finished renderings of the kettle in studio, a torch in studio and on a colour ground, a baton form, a turned bowl, and the construction views underneath them.

The same torch rendered against a flat pale-green background.
The same object on a colour ground, because a studio white is the easy case.

// What I did

My own renders only. Several files in this folder are a classmate's and are not on this page.

A long matte black baton form rendered vertically.
A long matte form, where there is almost nothing to hide behind.

// What came out of it

The poster is the real test and the reason the project exists: a render only has to survive on a white plate, but drop it into a photographed kitchen next to a real counter and real cabinets and every wrong reflection shows. The thing that improved fastest was patience with the lighting rather than skill with the modelling — most of what separates a flat render from a convincing one happens after the geometry is finished, and almost all of it is the shadow where the object meets the ground.

A wireframe construction view showing perspective guides and section lines.
Underneath all of it: construction lines, and a perspective that has to be right before any material is applied.

// Where it stands now

A finished module. Nothing here was made or sold; they are studies.

A render of a turned wooden bowl showing concentric grain rings.
A turned bowl, for the grain. Wood is the material that punishes a repeating texture hardest.

// What I'd do differently now

  • 01I spent the early weeks improving the model when the render was being let down by the lighting. Geometry is the part you can see yourself doing, which is exactly why it absorbs time it does not deserve.
  • 02These are renderings of other people's products and I did not label them that way at the time. On a portfolio that distinction is the whole difference between a craft exercise and a false claim, so the page states it plainly.
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