Bringing static and technical designs to life
So what…
This seems expensive and too technically demanding for my website
3D modelling apps
We use the latest 3D modelling apps that export ready(ish) for web. This is usually a complicated and multiple skillset process that’s expensive to commission. Now 3D party web animation software is coming along in leaps and bounds, making it a worthwhile investment over video or other multimedia production.
High performance
That rotating building animation you’ve just seen and hopefully wiggled your mouse over, along with its animations and post processing, comes in at a whopping 1.2mb. That’s smaller than most high-resolution images and any worthwhile video!
Normal person friendly
We’ve created a custom integration that can plop straight into our page builder, so that even people without coding ability can use it to create dynamic pages. Once the files have been prepared for web, they can be added to custom design layouts with ease anywhere on your page design.
It wasn’t always this easy
Making B2B beautiful
One of the tough things in marketing is making industrial and B2B products look “exciting”. We’ve had our fair share of creative challenges; like when one of our clients once asked us to create an exciting brand for a paint tin…
One of my first ever experiences with product shoots was to change out different flavours of a popular shampoo bottle in a £150k camera CNC rig so the client could perfectly replicate a swooping rotation on all their adverts. Today, I could sit in my pyjamas and do that in Blender. All major product advertising is CGI now, so why isn’t yours and why isn’t it on the web and interactive?
Not all products are designed to look like objects of desire; most things are functional. When it comes to making images of them, you are limited by a whole load of creative blockers including not having the budget or skills to produce quality product shots. Or perhaps you are still in the prototyping/planning stage and you need a presentable and flexible showpiece to wow prospective clients or investors.
So do you wanna know how we do it?
We used to have to make video or frame-by-frame animation if we wanted anything to look good.
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Show me how the magic happens
The software
Spline is a collaborative and easy to use 3D modelling and web rendering app that is free to get started with. It was released this year and we think it’s fantastic.
It bridges a difficult gap of 3D modelling and exporting it to web. There are many established 3D/WebGL solutions but they are very JavaScript heavy and are quite a headache for any web developer to tackle.
Spline solves this by an intuitive and “simple” design interface that has an export model that is almost ready to use. The free version comes with nearly all tools enabled so you can start creating fully-fledged 3D scenes from the outset.
Easy to add builder
We’ve been establishing our bespoke page builder using Advanced Custom Fields throughout this year. ACF is a powerful metabox creator that enables us to create bespoke and flexible controls so we can produce great looking pages without messing about with those temperamental visual drag and drop builders that are the bane of any developers life.
Our Flex-builder comes ready, out-of-the-box, with all the functional tools you need to start making great pages. Adding additional features is a breeze and allows you to scale your site without bloating it with features you’ll never use.
