CGSociety: Every year, CGSociety goes to SIGGRAPH, one of the premier conferences on innovation for the computer graphics and VFX industries in the world. In 2012, we watched as Martin Enthed, the IT Manager for the in-house communication agency of IKEA, gave a short presentation. He told us how their visualisation team had evolved from the use of traditional photography for the IKEA catalogue to a system today, where the bulk of its imagery is CG. I remember leaving the auditorium (which was packed) thinking, “Those natural-looking photographs in the IKEA catalogues are amazing. I can’t believe they're mostly CG. It’s incredible.” It was such a great presentation that we went and saw it again in 2013 when it was an official talk, and figured you guys might like to know how IKEA did it - what they had to build and innovate to get their still images to look so real. So we made a time to catch up with Martin, and asked him how and why IKEA decided to make the leap from traditional to digital.
2 comments:
Wow, what a thorough article! It was a fascinating inside look into how Ikea marketing and communications operate. Although I knew that many of the individual product images were CG, I had no idea that so many of the catalogue shots were as well.
After almost a decade of CG experience in such a large corporate environment, it sounds like Ikea has the system almost down to a science. The high level of automation and internal systems they created to streamline their production pipeline is fascinating.
One thing I must question is if using CG is somewhat of a trick when it comes to marketing. If the advertising picture you're looking at is no longer the item itself, then is the advertisement being subversive or deceiving? I understand that the reasoning given in the article for switching to CG is mainly one of logistics, but I can't help but wonder if switching to CG allowed the marketing team to cover up blemishes and flaws in their products.
Those images are really impressive. While Ikea is definitely a massive company with plenty of resources, I’m surprised to see that they have made such a huge commitment to CG product renderings.
I’m really impressed with realistic qualities of the images. I wonder how long it will take for this technology to be “plug and play” enough for theatrical designers to use. Between this and the recently much more impressive rapid prototyping technology that exists, I wonder how long it will be before we stop building models with foam core and start rendering and printing them in perfect scale.
What does this technology do to scenic artists? If photorealistic renderings are really this easy, why would you ever paint a backdrop? You could render and project it. Anything can be stylized in Photoshop. I’m wondering if this will displace artists as the technology evolves and becomes more available.
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