CAD Render-Rama

Yes that is one of the best product renderings I have seen in a while!

You can offset the end grain surface by a hundredth of a millimeter to apply a specific texture to it.
Make sure to round all the geometry’s edges by at least a tenth so that you do not notice the slight offset either directly or in the drop shadows.

Exactly. If I remember correctly I modeled to the correct millimeter thickness of the reference plywood (not the nominal inch-based thickness), built a repeating pattern from some available endgrain images, played with each texture’s scale until I had the correct number of plys applied to each surface, and applied a simple bump or normal map to get a little extra texture. It was super time consuming but ultimately worth it.

I create each of the plies as a separate body in SolidWorks so that way a distinct material can be applied to each body. I first create the primary surface, then thicken, then copy the bottom surface, thicken again, etc etc for each of the plies. This technique has the advantage of creating edges that are normal to each of the surfaces which is great for modeling molded plywood. I apply a darker wood material to the alternating plies when rendered to help mimic the different grain directions.

Definitely the way to go if you’re rendering molded plywood.

Really nice stuff! - was that actual work for Herman Miller or just a side project? Would be interested to hear what you used for the leather creases and fiberglass shaders as well.

Most of my work is in the systems furniture environment, but here are some more product focused images done recently for the FDIC show



I have done this before come to remember. I have seen some amazing plywood renders where they have used textures though.

Endgrain textures aren’t the hard part - it’s being able to get a good UV mapping especially for something that’s can’t be roughed in with a cubic map.

Hard when you’re working in Keyshot or most typical ID tools unless you export to an interim tool like Blender/Maya/Max to do the UV unwrapping.

This video seems to have a good overview of the process for Blender (which is free) if anyone wants to get fancy:

These are some renderings we recently delivered for a tradeshow booth and accompanying custom Chevy step van.



Rhinoceros+Keyshot…

goofing around with some old CAD that had all of the components in it.

I wish it was work for Herman Miller! It’s a personal project I started in 2016 for a presentation I gave at SOLIDWORKS World. I’ve since gone on to disassemble and reverse engineer all of the Eames pieces I’ve collected over the years. The fiberglass shell chair is probably the most accurate recreation, I had the shell 3D scanned and matched it within 0.01". Everything else is best guesses with a tape measure, calipers and photographs.

For the leather creases, they’re modeled in SW. I model the rough shape of the pillow, trim an outline for the tufting, then model a new surface passing through a crazy 3D spline that creates the creases. The screenshot explains it much better.

The fiberglass texture was created with the Keyshot material graph from a texture I found online. I can use the same material for the different colors, it’s just a matter of tweaking some of the nodes.



And a few more Eames renders. Everything modeled in SW, rendered in Keyshot, post in Photoshop.



Im - old so i feel like i need to justify the “date” the rendering was done as software was a little more “manual” 20years ago…

Gonna start with my housewares work and then .

This was done early 2000/2001 The unit in the case is the prototype and the one with the shoes is one of the renderings - everything is CG but the shoes. 4 render passes created - Alias Studio with photoshop


p58544z.jpg

Nice renders! Love the method for getting the leather creasing, I’ll have to try that one sometime. Is the 3d sketch controlled in any way, or floating where it looks right?

One the intern and I worked on today for fun.


It’s always a challenge trying to incorporate off the shelf components into already reduced spaces!

Nice,that second one is very realistic!

Another shot of that chair.

another chair experiment :slight_smile: