Pratt & Home Depot: Sprout Studios
Pratt Industries, a global leader in 100% recycled containerboard, partnered with Sprout to streamline the consumer experience in choosing home packing supplies. To support one of Pratt’s major clients, The Home Depot, Sprout devised a strategy to revamp how products are presented online. This initiative involved developing a unified approach to branding, including updated on-product labeling and dynamic package animations, aimed at making product selection simpler and more intuitive for customers.
I worked as Product Visualization Lead on this project and was responsible for material creation, conducting physics simulations to accurately portray the products in use, and rendering the full suite of packaging materials in Blender.
The Learning Curve
This project was highly demanding on the team at Sprout. I was one of 3 people in the studio who had experience in Blender and at the beginning of this project none of us really knew it that well. We were enthusiasts at best. We taught ourselves how to do complex physics simulations while maintain geometry mesh so detailed materials could be applied to it afterwards in a convincing way. Our goal was hyper realism. We studied all the materials meticulously and taught ourselves how to recreate them digitally. The two most challenging images were probably the stretchwrap and bubble wrap. The physics behind the strretchwrap were highly complex.
After learning how to create hyper real representations of all of these packing materials, we had to learn how to animate them. It was an era of learning at Sprout that propelled me to new heights professionally and I'm very grateful for the collaboration in that studio.
Inception
Look closely at the labels on the packaging materials in the images I have chosen to show here. There is a render within a render. 😉
