March 2024

Creating realistic renders

We love stylised 3D, but when you need an accurate visualisation of a clients product — photorealism is the best way. Fortunately Blender is well equipped to create realistic renders using the Cycles renderer.

This month Garrett has created an example of a realistic render by studying a product photo from esteemed New York furniture designer Christian Miano and recreating that photo using Blender.

A comparison of a photo and render of Christian Miano furniture

Can you tell which is the render and which is the original reference photo?

18k white gold blossom ring by Garrett Ray Jewellery

A wireframe image of this Christian Miano render showing the 3D models without lighting or materials.

Development Operations (DevOps)

This month we journeyed across the massive landscape of server orchestration evaluating options like containerisation, automation, Business as Usual (BAU) planning and continuous integration and testing.

For now, we’ll be implementing a simple Ansible setup, similar to Roots Trellis, in order to manage our servers. Ansible is an old one but offers the largest ecosystem for past implementations and problem solving knowledge. The core modules within Ansible afford us a framework for customisation that can potentially meet all our imaginable use cases.

We are a Git based organisation all the way to our timesheets, notes and server configs being Git managed and Markdown file based.

Folder outline of the private company_files repository

The company files repo’s main folder structure.

Currently these are all in a “mono repo” setup but we’ll be splitting that out into a business repo and a technical one for servers in the near future.

Having a solid CI/CD process is fundamental to offering web development to multiple clients. Building a scalable hosting solution that doesn’t take engineering time away from development efforts is going to be approached incrementally, allowing us to offer best in class services.

Garrett Ray Jewellery

To celebrate the star sign of Pisces, the zodiac for March, we produced this custom animation to share on our socials.

This custom animation was made in Blender and then finished with DaVinci Resolve.

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