Exploring CGI: Blending 3D Render and Photography

Exploring CGI: Blending 3D Render and Photography

This is a product photography tutorial for the Professional Interactive Education Program, Workshop #85

Blending CGI and Photography is the modern recipe for commercial success. Not because it’s always cheaper or easier to create a CGI product or environment—oftentimes it’s quite the opposite; poor or cheaply done CGI is always obvious and is a surefire way to tank an ad campaign. The reason CGI and photography are converging is because CGI enables advertisers the opportunity to pursue bold and unique presentations of commercial products that capture people’s imaginations to sell more product.

Consumers are bombarded by visuals at every turn; to capture even a moment of their time, product advertisers must continually strive to present fresh, compelling imagery and CGI offers almost boundless opportunities to do exactly that. Every product photographer will need to come to terms with this emerging paradigm shift: CGI will be used more and more in product photography, and CGI editing skills will be crucial for a commercial product photographer.

In this workshop you will learn how to use Blender, a free 3D modeling and rendering software application, to create a composition for a real product.

Your instructors for this workshop are Alex Koloskov and  Janine Pauke They will explain:

• – How to take photos of the product without propping, for future CGI scene creation
• – How to set up Blender as a beginner and start working in it
• – How to set up scene lighting to mimic actual in-studio lighting used for the product shot
• – How to create the CGI-built scene and seamlessly integrate it with the real product shot
• – How to process the final render in Adobe Photoshop to create the final image
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Enjoy our previous product photography workshops:

• Minty Fresh: Consumer Product Advertising Image
• Dyson Vacuum Cleaner Advertising Image
• Advertising Cognac Image: Advanced Compositing in Photoshop

Deadline for homework submission: September 9, 2020

The date of the live review: September 9, 2020 | 1PM PST