Tag: design

Building 3D with Ikea

When IKEA started to look at creating more than product images in 3D a few years ago, they already had a set look and feel for IKEA pictures. They wanted to keep the sense of reality and the feel of a “lived in” environment when moving over to digital workflow. They didn’t want their customers to see or even more importantly feel any difference. “We understand how important the knowledge of home furnishing is. How homes look, how homes feel, and so on. The experienced photographers at IKEA have been working with the interior designers on re-creating this feel for 15-20 years, some of them. We needed to translate that knowledge over to the 3D artists who were tech-savvy but in some cases coming directly from school. We needed them to understand the kind of feel we wanted the images to convey. It was very hard at the beginning.”

how the ikea catalog became mostly rendered, rather than photographed.

The Onion Art Department

Where The Onion gets truly weird is in its faux-local coverage–the archetypical “Area Man.” Area Man is one of The Onion’s longest-running memes, a take on the silliness and pomposity given to local schlubs by local news teams. But since none of these stories actually happened, The Onion’s art department has to create, from scratch, 1000s of different “everyday” scenarios. Some recent ones: “Area Man Pretty Sure He Knows Which Athletes Are Gay,” “Area Man Too Poor To Afford Movers, Too Old To Get Help From His Friends,” “Area Man Lacks Star Power Necessary To Carry Major Motion Picture.” These images call for subtle, banal shots, which can become totally forgettable or sell the joke by giving it the weight of a constructed world.

Brute force design

v0.1 of programmable matter:

Autodesk’s new CAD software lets the designer specify the parameters of a solid (its volume, dimensions, physical strength, even the tools to be used in its manufacture and the amount of waste permissible in the process) and the software iterates through millions of potential designs that fit. The designer’s job becomes tweaking the parameters and choosing from among the brute-forced problem-space of her object, rather than designing it from scratch