3D visualisation and animation — bringing your products to life

A career in 3D

I’ve been working as a 3D Visualiser and Animator for over 20 years. I was first introduced to the 3D realm back at university where I studied product and packaging design. Of course, back then what you could achieve with 3D was pretty rudimentary. The discipline wasn’t nearly as advanced as it is now; so many of the skills that I have have been self-taught over the years.

Based in Sheffield, I’ve worked with both large and small agencies across a wide range of sectors — from products and packaging to advertising, architecture and manufacturing. It’s an incredible and rewarding challenge to be able to create 3D images that appear so real that a viewer doesn’t realise that what I’ve created, doesn’t actually exist in physical space.

That’s the magic of 3D; an object doesn’t need to exist to have a tangible effect on its audience.

Why 3D works so well

While the industry has evolved over the years, the reasons why brands and businesses should invest in 3D visualisation and animation remain, broadly speaking, the same. With 3D visualisation, you can communicate ideas and processes better — and faster — to prospective customers and clients. The beauty of 3D is that we can build an object and then modify it to suit different audiences and achieve different levels of engagement. You don’t have to rely on the item to be real to get real, and impressive, results.

I can place an object in different locations or scenarios to show different contexts, or create and change materials to showcase different styles. The possibilities are really endless in the 3D world.

Implications for the industrial sector

My 3D work has particularly useful implications for Herron, as so many of our clients are in the industrial and manufacturing space.

The enclosed environments and tools that are commonplace throughout the sector — whether it’s factories and warehouses or complex pieces of machinery — are the working heart of what these companies can achieve for their customers. 3D allows us to showcase some of the most integral aspects of a manufacturing product in a visually-pleasing way. We can replicate, for example, all the internal elements of an engine so that a customer can see how it functions. We can break down different components to help them better understand how a product works and really highlight their efficiency, usefulness or overall significance to a piece of equipment.

Of course, the working environment of industrial and manufacturing spaces often means that products aren’t always looking their best. Or, they’re located in a space that isn’t easily accessible or photographable. With 3D visualisation we can avoid all those issues and really tell the story of a product so that a consumer can get to grips with how something works — and how it can benefit them — in a way that would otherwise be impossible.