It's a ship, not a boat!

As one of our biggest projects together, Cargo Care Solutions needed a strong way to launch and visualize their new division, Cargo Lashing. We were brought in to create various marketing materials, packshots, print assets and, last but not least, the biggest fully 3D-rendered video I had made to date.

A ship at sea

To give the launch some extra momentum, we agreed that I should create a 3D video placing the products in their natural element. As a counterpart to the classic product shots, we placed Cargo Care Solutions’ lashing systems directly onto a detailed 3D model of one of the world’s largest container ships. This gave us the opportunity to:

• Show the equipment in action by integrating the products directly into the ship’s most critical areas.
• Demonstrate the broad product range by "opening" the ship up and showing all the many places where the individual lashing products make a difference.
• Create images beyond the ordinary. 3D gives us the freedom to capture angles, cross-sections and details that an ordinary camera could never capture, and to pause reality whenever needed.

Before this project, my pipeline had primarily consisted of Blender and Substance Painter, but a previous project had taught me that it was probably time for something a little heavier. To create an ocean that lived up to expectations and handle the huge number of containers efficiently, I moved most of the production over to Houdini.

A sea of products

Alongside the video, we built a complete series of 3D packshots for the entire product line. We only had CAD drawings of the products to work from, and there were 40-50 of them, so I set up a conversion pipeline consisting of Houdini’s TOPs context and a program called InstaLOD.

In short, the process involved Houdini pulling a CAD file from a folder and sending it through InstaLOD, which converted it from NURBs into polygon-based 3D models. Houdini then pulled the converted model back in, added a simple material and saved it as a USD file. We worked closely with the engineers at Cargo Care Solutions to get all the textures and materials exactly right. After that, all that remained was starting a batch rendering process in Houdini,
and rendering every product from four different angles.

The result is a razor-sharp image library that the sales team still actively uses to present beautiful, realistic product images to potential customers and elevate the visual expression across digital channels, printed materials and other sales collateral.