Schwan-Stabilo
Nuremberg, Germany

Schwan-Stabilo has been a very fun company to work with. Their products are bright and colorful, designed for all ages, which is great for a 3D artist who enjoys getting the most out of his hardware and software. These are among my favorite projects, because they required a deep understanding of the rendering software, and I learned a lot with regard to producing complex material shaders with virtually no artifacts.

There is a lot going on in this turntable animation featuring Stabilo Point88 pens. The geometry is all manageable, but getting a clean render with this plastic shell casing required substantial fine tuning of render settings. Without optimization, the render would look very grainy, unrealistic, and prone to unattractive flickering. This project demonstrates how important it is to have a strong control over your 3D render engine, in this case, V-Ray.

I really enjoy playing around with 3D physics simulations, so when I was given free creative reign over this project featuring Stabilo BOSS highlighter pens, it didn’t take long for me to imagine this domino concept. The production itself was more difficult, and required a great deal of trial and error to get the objects to collide into each other in a dynamic and aesthetically pleasing way. The most challenging part was tweaking the fluorescent colors of the pen bodies, because such vivid colors are difficult to replicate on a standard computer screen. I was able to refine the bright colors much better for the close-up ‘hero shots’ where I could afford to use subsurface scattering. One key benefit of this 3D approach is that we can achieve much larger resolutions than with a typical photograph.