How Blender Can Supercharge Designers

At Ro, one of our core values is curiosity. We define it as:

“An unquenchable thirst for a deeper understanding. That child-like interest of always questioning why. The drive to learn new things.”

So when we found ourselves in the middle of launching 10 new treatments in the span of just a few months, we started asking some questions:

• How can we visualize new offerings more quickly so we can gain strategic alignment across teams?
• How can we create creative assets when physical products are still in production?
• How can we keep our creative fresh, in time when photoshoots are limited?
• How can we decrease the amount of time doing repetitive retouching tasks?
• How can we keep product photography up to date?

We found the answer to many of these questions to be, “let’s do it in 3D.” Blender, an open source 3D application, has proven to be a perfect fit for our needs.

Previsualization

3D helps build creative alignment among your whole team and allows you to fully visualize where the work is going (to bring people along the design journey). Using Blender, you can create low fidelity prototypes that allow you to work iteratively and identify the right solutions with ease, saving time and effort along the way.

Prototypes may not offer perfect lighting, materials, or even packaging proportions, but with a few basic shapes and some photoshopping, designers can create compelling original scenes for the team to get excited about. These previsualizations empower the design team to get early buy-in from decision makers and to better articulate a vision to production partners and specialists.

No more clipping masks

Remember the pen tool? A designer’s best friend — not anymore.

With rendered products, there’s no more isolating/matting, no more having to hand-paint fake drop shadows or getting angles perfect, no worries about transparencies, and best of all, you control the lighting.

You can create any number of lighting setups for a product to live in, move the camera to any angle needed, and easily export a PNG featuring shadows and a transparent background to drag and drop into your designs. Want a product upside down, at a 35º angle, with blue and pink lights around it? Done. The possibilities are endless.

Animated social content

One of the many ways to utilize your library of rendered products is through motion design. Creating new ads for social, whether organic or paid, is right at your fingertips. No more needing to set up lights, renting a steady-cam, and having eight arms to try to get the right shot.

In our current COVID-19 work environment, renders have played a key role in staying productive. COVID-19 forced us to change how we work, and limited access to photographers and photo studios, but did not constrain the ability of our team to create numerous advertisements for product launches or full commercials from the safety of our homes.

Product Simulation

If you have access to some digital calipers, it’s time to get nerdy and build your rendered products perfectly to scale. Being meticulous with the production of your renders can pay-off in more ways than one.

We have several form factors for packaging, and as we’re concepting, it’s good to get feedback around the physical reality and be confident in ideas we’re proposing. So for example:

Will X number of supplements fit into the package we are trying to move forward with? If we know the dimensions of the content in question and know that our package is to size, we can run a simulation in Blender that tests if X number of supplements or contents will fit, or if we need to size up or down on the packaging.

As designers, we’re always looking to be a swiss-army knife of skills. Blender is a versatile tool that when added to your designer utility belt (shout out Batman) can supercharge your design work.

And the best part is, Blender is open source! Blender is constantly listening to it’s vibrant global community, iterating quickly on development, and improving their software at no cost to you. Open source also means you don’t need to worry about licensing. Just download, and dip your toe’s in to feel those sweet 3D waters.

Now, I know opening a new program and looking at a dashboard that resembles the controls from USS-Enterprise can be daunting, so take it slow and start with the basics. Learn as you go. There are TONS of services and spectacular teachers in the Blender community, so here are a few to jump-start your experience:

Derek Elliott — Entertaining Youtube tutorials that offer good start-to-finish processes within Blender, and some good humor.

BlenderGuru—From beginner to experienced, BlenderGuru has tutorials about lighting, modeling, textures.

Ian Hubert—Very advanced, but a killer guy and his “Lazy Tutorial” series is fun to watch (even if I don’t know what he’s doing with that magic.)

CG Geek—Blender tutorials, tech reviews, and visual effects

CG Cookie — Subscription website that has tons of tutorials on Blender. (This is where I started, specifically, the low-poly rocket tutorial.)

Rays renders—So your computer renders things out slower than grass growing? Rays Renders uses servers to render visuals quickly online. Just upload, pay a small fee, and boom.

Numerous design blogs pose the question “should designers code?” But I’d like to pose a new conversation — should designers blend? Stay curious.