Tag: images

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.

Lumberjack Mythology

America has the most ridiculous mythical creatures the world has ever known. Hands down. Nowhere else has a mythology formed so beautifully in a perfect amalgam of too much whiskey, too little sleep, and perhaps some accidentally consumed magic mushrooms. The splinter cat is like a regular cat, minus any semblance of logic. This husky feline is an indiscriminate destroyer of hollow trees, which it mines for bees and raccoons. Climbing a tree, it propels itself off with powerful legs right into another, blasting the trunk with its wedge-shaped snout and reinforced noggin. The experienced frontiersman knows well “the moronic activities of the Splinter Cat. If the Cat finds food in the ruptured trunk, he is temporarily appeased. If not, he goes immediately for another tree. And right there is the big trouble. The Cat doesn’t use any judgment in selecting trees, he just smashes one after another until he gets a meal.”