3D render of a sealed can of liquid floating in water. This could be your product.

Nabina Ghosh Creative Services and Ideas (NGCSI), offers product-focused 3D modelling & 3D animation as well as 2D animation.

Till date, we have worked with SMBs across India as well as abroad. On long-term brand projects as well as on one-off briefs/requirements. Connect if you know exactly what you need for your brand. Or see more about our 3D visualisation and 3D Animation services.

Click through some of the more categorised sections below to see some work:

Why are brands are choosing 3D modelling/animation over photography/videography?

Total control at a fraction of the cost.
No studio setup needed.
No physical equipment necessary.
The world is the limit when it comes to reproducing a thought or look.
Reusability of work once done in various other formats, situations and environments.
Achieving otherwise-impossible compositions.

These are just a few of the reasons brands are looking at 3D reproductions of the real thing. For a more detailed explanation of when to choose 3D or photography, see this blog post.

Below are some examples of the work done in the field. Some for brands, some to experiment with, some just to have fun. My thoughts while making them are added before any that are worth mentioning:

Brand: MitraSena Agri-products

It has been my great honour to have been a part of this brand evolution story, and my association with Manohar Malani, the father of the brand, has been, and continues to be, one of the most enriching experiences in my tenure in the field of marketing and communication.

While working with him on the entire process of brand building, from strategising, to dreaming, to executing (in no particular order) has been… how do I put it… the most fun I have had learning at work.

Setting the usual industry usage of the word “Client” aside for once, I will definitely say “Client ho toh aisa!”!

While most business owners have a very good idea about their own brand (contrary to what we stereotype them as), very few actually participate in the crucial job of relaying that to the brand custodians who help them take the said businesses forward through marketing, sales, communication, etc. This is what creates the notorious client-requirement vs agency-execution gap. Manohar, on the other hand, helps bridge that beautifully by working with all his teams at every stage of the journey, explaining, vetting, and discussing (while constantly learning in the process too, and never shying away from admitting it!).

Now this must not be confused with the infamous micro-managing behaviour of clients who seek control over every step of the process, and I have been in the industry long enough to know the difference. I can go on about him, but it would take a multiple-page essay to do what I have to say any justice.

That being said, below is just the 3D part of the work I did for his brand. The other work I helped with, apart from the advertising communication part of it, was in the making of the packaging designs for his entire range. Which I then used to make the 3D renders for the products.

Brand: Joy Cosmetics

My work with a cosmetic brand was a challenging one, as here the job was two-fold. To showcase the product in all its glory, as well as to convey an emotion or a product benefit through the treatment of the film or product window. Hydration is not just H2O. It is water. Splashing. Sparkling. Sunscreen reminds you of the sun. What is the difference between sunlight and being sunlit? Tried to define, tried to answer questions, and tried to bring the products alive in the pieces below. It was a great learning experience too, that stood me in good stead with other brands.

Brand: NGCSI

This section consists of a mix of work for brands that never saw the light of day for various reasons. Hence some of the work here is not in its final stage of render. These projects have been put away for now. If any of it fits your brand or product, and you want to put your logo on it, connect.

SHOWCASING JUICE VARIANTS

I was asked to make an animation showcasing fruit crush variants.

There were two ways to go about it. One was to spend time showing each variant individually. Perhaps what went into each flavour. The ingredients. The differences. The details.

The other was, given the relatively low-involvement product category, to simply leave the viewer with a feeling… a feeling of variety, of energy, of colour… almost psychedelic. Ending with a splash to convey how the product would leave you feeling.

I went with the latter. What would you have liked had the brand been yours?

SHOWCASING PRODUCT RANGE

An animation I made for a retail outlet. A retail outlet needs to showcase that it has a variety of products, without necessarily honing in on any one of them. The same applies to online delivery platforms, supermarkets, wholesalers, distributors, manufacturers wanting to showcase the breadth of their catalogue, and many others.

This does not require the kind of investment that would go into detailed photo shoots of individual products in all their glory. The objective is different here. The idea is not to sell one or two sexy products. The idea is to show we have different things on offer, sexily. After all, we are not selling the individual third-party brands here. We are selling the convenience of bringing whatever the customer wants to them. In a fun way (A typical customer is not making very involved purchase decisions here. They are adding things to cart quickly, almost every day, checking out).

Connect if your business needs this. Or explore my other services that could come of use to you.

SHOWCASING ANOTHER PRODUCT RANGE

Another animation I made in the same series on product-range animations (see my earlier one above), this time for services like online delivery apps. Just a different treatment.

The objective again was not to sell any one product. It was to showcase variety.

This time, the thought took the form of a Rubik’s Cube. But with a difference.

Traditionally, a solved Rubik’s Cube resolves into six faces, each becoming one large picture or colour. But that would have defeated the purpose here.

The products will remain many in number. Variety is the point of the message. Which is why the product images continue to remain varied even after the cube resolves itself.

Only one side becomes a single image. My 3D services logo.

The way I looked at it, the multitude of products, variants and possibilities do not need resolving. They simply need a way to be brought together into a coherent story. The agent that makes that happen is the only thing that resolves itself.

A visual device is useful. But only when it makes complete sense.

What do you think?

SHOWCASING A TYPICAL PRODUCT

I made this product animation while keeping a particular challenge often faced when showcasing day-to-day products in mind.

There are hundreds of ads for the category on air. A floor. Something happening on it or kept on it. The floor is almost a prop in the story. The product is present, but rarely the hero.

How does one make the product the hero? Without just making it a large floor tile image in the centre of an ad, saying, “We make floor tiles”?

This was my answer. Thoughts on how else it could have been tackled?

Connect if you feel your product deserves more than just a catalogue photograph or prop-treatment behind a forced story.

SELLING MY OWN SERVICES

I made this to further my thoughts on my blog “3D Product Rendering vs Photography: When to Use Which” (you can read it HERE)

This is an example of a visual that would have been either monumentally costly, or practically impossible to achieve through traditional photography or videography within a short time span.

Thought to expression. The transition can be seamless and beautiful.

Connect to explore how 3D visualisation can bring your product, story or brand to life.

SHOWCASING A GEAR PUMP

How I took on a challenge (or many challenges, rather) often faced while showcasing industrial products… That of showing the beauty in a “non-beautiful” product, along with an idea of its workings, rolled into a short product window animation.

In this particular one my goal was to show the inner workings without making it look too complicated, yet competently formidable, where there can be space to slow it down and add relevant messaging where needed.

I also wanted to utilise the time needed to show the innards, to also show what the machine actually does for the user, so the duration could be halved yet not make the two things distract from each other. While looking good all the way.

What do you think of the end result? Any tips/suggestions on how to do it better next time?

SHOWCASING A WATCH

This wrist watch is another of my projects involving the showcasing the insides of a precision engineering product through 3D animation.

How is this similar or different from my animation of the Gear Pump (above) is that though this also uses lighting and camera movement to bring out the beauty in metal, this is the magnification of a micro world that is beautiful, but too intricately small to really see.

Watch lovers will relate. This is for them.

Animating the ticking to synchronise with the oscillations of the gears was fun. Even though only I know that they synchronise, and it wouldn’t have really mattered in the final output. But I enjoy working on the details too. Little details that satisfy me… that I did a complete job 🙂 (Yes the ticking is a little faster than 1 second per tick [0.7(333) seconds per tick to be exact], but that was intentional. A call I took for purely aesthetic reasons).

Connect if we can work together on things like this. Or just enjoy.

SHOWCASING A WATCH ANOTHER WAY

This is the next in the series of watch animations I made. Same watch, different briefs.

The first one (above) was about showcasing the insides of a precision engineering product through 3D animation. The magnification of a micro world that is beautiful, but too intricately small to really see.

The brief for this one was different. It was about how unbelievably good the watch looks. About the magic behind it rather than the engineered parts.

The next one in this series will be different again. It will be about how great watch designs are timeless, and focus more on the design itself.

Same product. Three different stories. Three different briefs. Appealing to different sensibilities within the same target audience.

After this is the third one.

SHOWCASING A WATCH YET ANOTHER WAY

This is the third animation in the watch series I have been posting recently. Same watch, different briefs, each appealing to different sensibilities of the same target audience (above).

The first one was about the engineering. The beauty hidden inside a precision machine. The second was about the magic. The sense of wonder that makes a watch more than the sum of its parts.

This one is about the design. The thought behind it was simple. Time never stops. Yet some designs seem remarkably unaffected by it.

THE EVOLUTION OF A NIKON CAMERA

I will tell you the story behind a Nikon FM10 today. It started as a 3D model of the camera I made more than 20 years ago. It took rudimentary form which I really really liked.

20 years later I made it in polymer clay.

Today I revisited it with my new learnings in 3D.

Here’s the result.

Want to breathe life into your story, product or brand at a fraction of videography costs? Connect.

SHOWCASING A PERFUME BOTTLE

The story here, as is the case with such products, is how the visual makes you feel. One of my earliest pieces of work with water splashes.

SHOWCASING A SOFT DRINK CAN

Just a minimalistic splash that I felt worked really well in portraying a product entry shot. One that I am surprisingly the proudest of till now (which is also why it earned its place as the cover photo for this page).

Experimental stuff

Here are some of the fun projects I worked on, in order to learn about and explore the 3D realm.

AN EXPERIMENT WITH GEARS

I made this after seeing an animation of a large number of gears working together and thinking, “That looks ridiculously satisfying. I need to make something like that.”

Then I came across a beautiful eye animation and thought, “I wonder if I know enough Blender to pull that off yet.”

So I added an eye.

Then I came across a beautiful space animation and thought exactly the same thing.

So I added space.

Somehow, it all started making sense.

At this point, one could argue that I was no longer making sensible project decisions.

The challenge then became making all these things coexist in a way that did not feel random.

The gears themselves were an interesting problem. I wanted them to behave as they would in reality. Not just spin randomly, but turn because neighbouring gears forced them to. Positioning them so they meshed correctly without overlapping was one challenge. Warping the entire composition onto a curved surface without breaking that relationship was another.

I also wanted the story to constantly shift between scales. Macro to micro. Then back again. Then further out. Then further in.

One other thing I discovered while making this was that loops can become predictable surprisingly quickly. My solution was to pair it with music that keeps building. The animation loops. The music doesn’t. At least not immediately. I found that helped keep the piece feeling like it was going somewhere, even when it was returning to where it started.

What emerged surprised me.

The project started making me think about patterns that repeat at different scales.

The gears.
The eye.
The cosmos.

Very different things. Yet somehow connected by systems, motion and relationships.

By the end, I found myself wondering whether the same rules that govern a machine also govern a galaxy. Whether everything is connected through physics. Or whether physics is simply another name for something much bigger.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that this project taught me a lot about Blender, problem solving, rendering optimisation, and how to build complexity without letting it become chaos.

And that is usually where the best learning happens.

Does anybody else find themselves seeing the same patterns repeated at wildly different scales? At what point does a collection of unrelated ideas become a story? Do you think the connections we see between things are discovered… or invented?

Am I the only one who starts a gear study and somehow ends up in outer space?

AN EXPERIMENT IN ESCHER

I made this because I have wanted to make an Escher animation for a very long time.

The first challenge was the obvious one. An Escher structure only works from a particular point of view. Move the camera carelessly and the illusion falls apart. But that wasn’t the challenge I found most interesting.

The challenge I threw myself was this: Could I make an Escher staircase obey Physics? A paradox, right? A paradox on top of a paradox, if one considers paradoxes to be at the heart of Escher’s work itself.

I could easily have cheated and animated the ball along a path to get the same result. You would never have known the difference. But I wanted the ball to obey the laws of Physics and Gravity, and move as it should. And that’s what I made it do. (Forgive me, but felt a little bit like God even maybe?)

Want to take a guess on how I went about doing that? I’m not giving the secret away unless someone guesses it right.

JUST A SWING. ON A CLIFF. OVER THE OCEAN. IN THE MOONLIGHT.

Brands are not just about products, but about stories and emotions, the senses, what it leaves you with, and so much more. Simulation of a swing on a cliff over the ocean, swinging in the moonlight. A mood piece.

SIMULATION OF ICE MELTING

I know this looks a little tacky. But I made this on my laptop when I was beginning to learn Blender. So it holds a special place in my heart for me. It taught me much. So much. I think my biggest teacher still is my own OCD regarding wanting to get things exactly the way I see them in my head though. Helps me learn through troubleshooting till I get it right. But also causes me unending “necessary” anxiety in the process. (After all, if we are not in it for the ride too…)

SIMULATION OF A LAZY BALL ON THE LAZY STEPS OF A LAZY SUNNY VILLA

This was made when I was teaching myself about Blender Physics. I had made that curtain blow in the wind a little. Spent a lot of time on that. But then i removed that. Was taking away from the ball and the mood it set. Sometimes you need to hold back on your creativity even if you can make it. Ultimately it is about the final piece and not your skills.