3D product modelling for renders, the web and AR

E-commerce and D2C brands order 3D product modelling for their product pages. Furniture and decor brands order it for ranges with many fabrics and finishes. Manufacturers order it to show a product to distributors before the tooling is made.

A 3D model is a digital copy of the product: its shape, its parts and its surfaces. Once it exists, every picture and view of the product can be made from it, without the product being in front of a camera. These are the usual uses.

• Product renders and pack shots for a website or a catalogue
• A product film or animation
• A model the shopper can turn in the browser: see 3D models for websites
• Augmented reality, where the product is placed in the shopper's room through a phone
• Furniture placed in room-set images

The more exact the reference, the more exact the model. CAD is the most reliable starting point. Without CAD we work from drawings and photographs, and we ask for a few measurements to check the result against.

• Product CAD files, if they exist
• Technical drawings with dimensions
• A sample sent to the studio, for small products
• Photographs from the front, side, back and above, with close-ups of the materials
• The overall height, width and depth
• The list of colours, finishes or sizes to cover
• Where the model will be used: renders, website, AR or all of them

A model built for a close-up render carries a great deal of detail. That file is too heavy for a web page opened on mobile data. For the web and for AR we make a lighter version of the same model. It has fewer polygons, which are the small flat faces that make up the surface. It has smaller textures, which are the images that give the surface its colour and grain. Its geometry is compressed.

Tell us at the start if you want both renders and a web model. We then plan the build so that both come from one piece of work and nothing has to be rebuilt later. The detailed version goes to 3D product rendering. The light version is delivered as a GLB file, with a USDZ file if you need AR on iPhone.

A sofa or a bed has soft forms, seams and cushions, which take more care to model than a hard-edged product. A furniture range usually has one frame and many fabrics, so we model the frame once and make each fabric or wood finish a variant of it. A modular sofa is built as separate units, which are then combined into each configuration you sell.

The finished models go into room-set images for the catalogue and into AR for furniture, where the shopper sees the piece in their own room at its real size. This is why the dimensions you give us matter. A shopper will measure their room against the model.

3D product modelling is quoted per model. There is no single 3D model price in India that fits every product, because a plain side table and a recliner with stitched leather and a moving mechanism are very different amounts of work. We do not bill by the hour. The quote gives a charge for each product on your list, so the total is known before work starts.

Send the product list with a photograph and the dimensions of each item. We reply with the charge per model, the number of revision rounds and a schedule. These are the things that move the price of a model.

• The shape: flat panels and simple curves take less work than soft or sculpted forms
• The number of separate parts and materials
• The reference: CAD is quicker to work from than photographs
• The number of colour, finish or size variants
• The outputs: a model for renders, a model for web and AR, or both
• The size of the range, and how much the products share