[website] 75% of IKEA's catalogue is computer generated imagery

[Arthur]

If you didn't already know, I reckon most people wouldn't be able to tell.

 

Source: CG Society (via Fast Co. Design)

 

Today, around 75% of all IKEA’s product images are CG, and they have a ‘bank’ of about 25,000 models. “These are all created at a ridiculously high resolution,” explains Martin, “We render them in 4Kx4K, and they need to hold up to that resolution. We need to be able to do whatever we like with the renderings - print them on large walls in the stores if we need to. Even if most of them are only ever used on the website, they all have the capability to be printed very high-res.”

 

The first entire room image to be created in CG for one of IKEA’s catalogues was in 2010. “There were a LOT of people involved in that image,” says Martin. “As you can imagine, the first time you do something, everyone wants to have a look! But then the catalogue after that had four or five images and it really took off.”

 

“The most expensive and complicated things we have to create and shoot are kitchens. From both an environmental and time point of view, we don’t want to have to ship in all those white-goods from everywhere, shoot them and then ship them all back again. And unfortunately, kitchens are one of those rooms that differ very much depending on where you are in the world. A kitchen in the US will look very different to a kitchen in Japan, for example, or in Germany. So you need lots of different layouts in order to localise the kitchen area in brochures. Very early on we created around 200 CG exchanges versions for 50 photographed kitchens in 2008, with the products we had - and I think everyone began to understand the real possibilities.”

 

One of the things that continues to make this transition smooth, Martin believes, is the use of V-Ray to render. “We use 3DStudio Max and V-Ray. They were using Max and V-Ray before I started actually, but I didn’t mind because I’d been using Max with all the different renderers since 1990 (it wasn’t even called Max then - it was the DOS version!). I’d dabbled with V-Ray before I came but I saw its true potential in realistic still image rendering in the IKEA use case. We produce huge numbers of still images every day, and with V-Ray it’s easy to crank up the values, set and forget. We don’t mind so much how long the rendering takes, so long as the artist doesn’t have to go back and tweak something, like they’d have to in mental ray and other renderers. V-Ray is very good for us. It has a huge amount of settings, but if you set it right you can use one slider to go from coarse, noisy renderings to very high-end, crisp renderings just by changing a value. And when artists learn to see through the noise in previews, then it’s just about changing one value when you go to production renderings. It’s easy to learn and it behaves the way light should behave. Helping our photographers make that knowledge transfer to CG would have been so much harder if the renderer didn’t treat light in that way.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 7, 2014 by Arthur

[pcstru]

And while generating CGI images of such stunning quality is hugely difficult and can tie up teams of computer graphic artists for days, weeks or even months putting together the final render ... it is still quicker than actually assembling the items. Edited September 7, 2014 by pcstru

[elsiegee40]

And while generating CGI images of such stunning quality is hugely difficult and can tie up teams of computer graphic artists for days, weeks or even months putting together the final render ... it is still quicker than actually assembling the items.

 

++Rep...I so agree!

[Little-Miss]

EVERYTHING IS A LIE!

[featured_spectre]

EVERYTHING IS A LIE!

 

What about the cake?

[Greenbeast]

this is quite interesting

 

 

p.s. cake is always a lie

[AMLinington]

Mind. Blown. No wonder the layouts in the brochures look so pretty compared to the end result...

[SiliconAlley_Sam]

Amazing!

[sonofsanta]

$technician and I have just collected our gobs from the floor. Incredible stuff, especially that second to last one.