3D Visuals in Arduino Ecosystem
Hello! I’m Tuğrulhan and I want to talk about how we work with 3D visuals at Arduino which are computer generated images or graphics that exist in a digital three dimensional space. I’ve been working at Arduino since 2017 as a product designer, integrating the 3D visuals to our ecosystem from the first day. As they are my babies, I am really excited to explain everything about them from the materials to how and where they are used, but Let’s begin with why we use them first!
Arduino hardware and software have a diverse set of features and capabilities. We have products and solutions for a wide range usage cases. Our customer base starts from beginners to advanced tinkerers and even industrial users. That also means that we need to be able to present our products clearly to these broad user groups which have different needs and understanding of micro controllers. As the visual design team, we produce illustrations, photos, schematics and diagrams and more. We use all these mediums to clearly communicate every aspect of our products. So that our users can easily choose the product that fits their need and get to know how to use it. As Fabrizio mentioned in the previous introductory post, clear and beautiful visuals are also helpful for us to create a strong brand identity and stand out in terms of aesthetics and user-experience among our competitors.
The many uses of 3D visuals
There are several reasons behind why we introduced 3D visuals at Arduino. We need a lot of visuals for hardware visualization to educational content, datasheets and marketing assets. First, 3D visuals are relatively easy to create. We can hyper zoom or show exploded views of the components to explain their functionality. We establish component libraries and reuse on our 3D models so the modeling time for our boards are getting gradually shorter. We can create animations where we can show the boards from different angles or communicate the relation of components in motion. When needed, we can make fast updates and recreate our visuals assets with pressing just one button.
Before, for each assembly step for our products, for each product visual from different angles, we had to draw new illustrations or prepare a new photo shoot session individually. Thanks to 3D visuals, these can be addressed much faster.
In addition, nothing stays the same, technology evolves and we at Arduino make constant improvements on our hardware to continue staying on the pioneer side. To be able to continue innovating and satisfy the need, we need to adapt and make changes constantly on our product portfolio. For us as the visual design team this means that we often have to redo a lot of our visuals whether it is an illustration or a photo. Thanks to the 3D visuals, we can be more agile doing these adaptations.
Moreover, our marketing campaigns play a big importance for displaying our products to our users for them to easily choose what they need. How do we achieve that? We tell stories with our marketing campaigns. We start with the most important features of our products, then come up with powerful concepts to communicate them in an engaging way.
Advantage of using 3D for our marketing campaigns is that we are not limited to constraints of the physical world. When we want to highlight a powerful processor on a tiny micro controller, we can have fun with it and put a tiny figure on top of a board and place clouds and skyscrapers behind.
At Arduino, We are thriving for democratizing electronics and programming and making complex technologies easy to use. We use a lot of 3D visuals for the content of our educational products and the content is a very big and important part of them. We try our best to break down complex concepts for our educational content. Learning new things can feel frustrating for a lot people. For me, as a product designer, If I can help our users with reducing the learning frustration even a little, that is a big win. That’s what gives me the motivation to spend a full day animating cables and wires for an assembly animation.
An open source software for an open source company
Those are the reasons why we use 3D in Arduino in a nutshell and we wouldn’t be able to do it without Blender, the 3D software we use at Arduino. The term “open source” lays really close to our hearts, that’s why it wasn’t hard to choose Blender for our ecosystem. Same as Arduino, Blender is also very community driven. That’s why it is really intuitive and constantly evolving. So much so that every day more companies are switching to Blender from the other known 3D software.
Blender offers a great span of things. You can model, sculpt, create materials, animate, render and post process whether you want a photo-realistic or stylized visual. At Arduino we are not doing Disney animations, so having a single but well rounded software works perfect for our needs. In addition, all the optimizations that they worked on especially in the last couple of years, made Blender to be overall a very powerful software.
Fantastic Renders and Where to Find Them
Over the years, I worked on establishing a cohesive Arduino look for our 3D visuals. The 3D visuals we create can be separated into two main categories; informative and decorative. These two categories have different needs. For our educational content, We are trying to breakdown more complicated concepts into digestible chunks of information. Therefore, we opted in for an almost-illustration-like simple look. So the focus is on the important bits of information that we are trying to convey. On contrary for the decorative illustrations, although still being technically accurate, we are going for a more polished look. The biggest usage case for the photo-realistic renders are our marketing visuals. We want our customers to see our products as detailed as possible, allowing them to dive in and discover each component as they are seen through a microscope. 3D visuals allows us to do that.
We have established styles for our 3D visuals today, however it took years of experimentation for finding the right tone. We wanted to make renders that really look and feel like Arduino so that they are cohesive with the rest of our visuals in our visual ecosystem. A big part of it was of course our scene setup and material library. We use the same camera setup on our 3D visuals as we have for our photo shootings to replicate the same proportions and angles. We created an extensive material library to use for a wide variety of products and props. We have more than 20 different material templates for different type of plastics, metals, epoxies which are easy to duplicate to create new color versions with when needed. It is still constantly evolving together with the new products we add to our portfolio.
Hope you found this article insightful and could get a bit behind the scenes information about why and how we create our 3D visuals at Arduino. You can check our Behance page if you are interested in some more product-specific work we have done. That’s all for now. Until next time!
