Welcome to our hub for everything 3D and VFX, where we keep you up to date with the latest trends and innovations that we’re excited about and closely monitoring.
3D and VFX are the foundation of immersive storytelling and it’s essential that we stay on top of the rapidly changing tech landscape. Whether it’s optimized 3D content for interactive experiences or highly photorealistic VFX for promotional videos and marketing collateral, you need a partner who is exceptionally talented with these fundamental capabilities.
3D stands for three-dimensional, which means something has height, width, and depth—just like real objects that you can pick up and look at from different angles. 3D modeling is a complex skillset that intertwines creative art and technology to craft digital assets.
Our 3D artists use various software to sculpt and texture objects to make them look as real or as stylized as necessary. The quality of your 3D content can make or break your experience, which is why our team has built proprietary pipelines over the past 15 years to optimize our geometry and bake lighting into materials so they look premium, but run performant. This technique is crucial for building detailed and fully interactive immersive worlds for our clients.
VFX stands for visual effects. It’s a way to enhance or modify images and videos. Computer generated imagery (CGI) is used to create effects that help make scenes look real that would otherwise be too difficult, expensive, or dangerous to film in real life.
For example, transporting actors to different worlds, bringing imaginative characters or monsters into our world, or overlaying digital experiences over the real world. VFX has become so commonplace in digital storytelling today that you’d be hard pressed to find a movie or even a Tik Tok video without some basic visual effects.
In immersive storytelling, 3D and VFX help create realistic and engaging worlds that people can interact with. 3D provides you with assets you can interact with, whether in a virtual world or an augmented reality. VFX adds details “in post” that creates compelling marketing videos or imagery to better tell and promote the story.
Together, they make immersive realities feel believable and fun, essential for AR, VR, XR and mixed reality games or branded experiences.
Are you investing in immersive experiences or digital content like games, but struggling to get enough reach? You owe it to yourself to promote your experiences with high quality 3D video production that generates excitement and reaches a larger audience. You’ve probably already created the 3D assets anyway - so why not get more use out of them?
One of the biggest shifts in 3D rendering techniques is Gaussian splatting - a fast, efficient way to create lightweight, high-quality interactive 3D visualizations that support the development of diverse industries.
Brush up on essential 3D and VFX terms for a deeper understanding.
A polygon mesh is a type of computer graphics technique used for creating 3D models. It is a collection of vertices, edges and faces that define the shape and surface of a 3D object. The more polygons in a scene, the more realistic it willy typically look, but also the more compute intensive it becomes. It is often used in computer games, animation, virtual reality, and computer-aided design (CAD).
This process involves applying realistic surface details to 3D models, like adding brick patterns to a wall or wrinkles to clothing, to make them look more lifelike. Physically-based rendering (PBR) materials define the surface properties to ensure that light is properly simulated when it interacts with the object. A 3D artist has to define multiple material maps such as Albedo, Normal, Roughness, Metalness, and more. For instance, without texture mapping, a 3D model of a basketball would just appear as a smooth, orange sphere. But with texture mapping, it can have the detailed lines and textured surface that make it instantly recognizable as a basketball.
Light doesn’t just hit an object—it bounces, bends, and reflects, and ray tracing captures all of that to create ultra-realistic visuals in a 3D world. By accurately simulating how light interacts with surfaces, this technique adds lifelike reflections, shadows, and depth to digital scenes. Real-time ray tracing is what is used in video games and interactive experiences so that you can immediately see the updated perspective at 60+ frames-per-second. Whereas ray tracing is used for very complex, final renders that would take hours to simulate like an animated movie or an Architect’s render of a building. Did you know that in Toy Story 4, the most complex frame took 1,200 hours to render?? Ray tracing is essential for high-end video games, simulations, and immersive experiences, making every detail shine with stunning accuracy.
Ever wondered how video games and movies create realistic smoke, fire, or flowing water? That’s where particle systems come in. By generating thousands of tiny moving particles that follow the fundamental laws of physics, they recreate natural effects like fog, explosions, and splashes.
In the past few years there have been recent innovations in 3D visualization with technologies such as NeRFs and Gaussian Splatting that use neural models to pre-determine what the user should see without traditional meshes. This method is excellent for making photorealistic 3D objects efficiently, but it isn’t good when you need interactivity.
Motion capture, or “mo-cap,” is what gives digital characters natural, fluid movements. By tracking real-life motion from actors or objects, this technology translates it into 3D animations, making everything from facial expressions to full-body action scenes look more lifelike. It’s a go-to technique in films, video games, and virtual reality, helping digital characters move and react just like real people, making them feel more believable and emotionally engaging.
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