CINEMA 4D Helps Philips "Plug In" to Their Branding Strategy

Packaging design made easy with MAXON software.

To better convey their branding strategy of "sense and simplicity" Philips, a global manufacturer of consumer products chose to employ 3D graphics in their packaging design - CINEMA 4D paved the way.

Tony Barone, the sole 3D artist at the Ledgewood, NJ office of Philips Accessories and Computer Peripherals NA, worked collaboratively with package design artist, Cleo Ramos, to develop a semi-photorealistic look for packaging graphics in accordance with Philips' exacting guidelines. Philips required that their products look like an accurate representation of the finished products, and ancillary products look generic in appearance but clearly recognizable, while maintaining the same graphic style for all product imagery. Additional requirements were that the front of the package must clearly depict the respective product and the back of the package must illustrate the product in use.

Adding to this already challenging environment was the fact that one model per day had to be built, and these models required far more detail than those of previous projects. To fully illustrate the "in use" imagery, Tony had to model a laptop computer and a cell phone, each with a generic but easily identifiable look. Further complicating the creative environment was the fact that the Power Solutions project was in-sourced from a European division of Philips, tasked with creating American packaging. This meant Tony was actually working for a different division of the company for the first time, with bosses to please whom he had never met.
To achieve all goals, Tony used CINEMA 4D to model multiple Philips products such as cables, universal USB chargers, and a flat-screen TV mount, all prior the products actually being manufactured. To facilitate this process, Tony used prototypes for reference coupled with descriptions of the finished look. To the satisfaction of all at Philips and despite time and budget constraints, Tony and Cleo completed the Power Solutions project on budget and ahead of schedule!

The graphics created for the Power Solutions project were created in a non-linear pipeline. While Tony was modeling all digital assets Cleo simultaneously created the package design. "When we were both ready, we collaborated on how each model would be shown on the package. CINEMA 4D was the perfect tool because it allowed us to show the product models at whatever angles we needed to render them at, for example, the cell-phone and USB charger. They were positioned and rendered separately in CINEMA 4D then put together for the 'in-use' package illustrations within Photoshop. CINEMA 4D was able to render the models with alpha channels, which made it even easier to work with the final renders within Photoshop," says Tony.

This approach allowed Philips to have the packaging ready for shipping the moment the product was finished, pushing the product out to market much faster. Historically, package design techniques involved photographing completed products, selecting photos, sending those to the package design artist, manufacturing the packaging, and boxing and shipping the product, often long after the product had been manufactured.



To facilitate the time and quality requirements of the Power Solutions project, Tony relied upon the CINEMA 4D R10.5 core package with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop on a Macintosh running Leopard. His love of modeling with CINEMA 4D made him embrace this unusual and demanding project as a personal favorite. Attesting to the efficiency and simplicity of working in CINEMA 4D, Tony relates that the entire project size weighed in at under 100MB and took the two artists a mere two weeks to complete. The total project consisted of eight product packages utilizing fifteen models with over twenty five renders. He reports the render time for one frame was less than 1 second!
"CINEMA 4D helped me realize my vision with its ease of use. I spent less time figuring out how to create the shapes for the models I needed and more time making them look great with a level of detail I could not have accomplished without CINEMA 4D. Even though these models will probably never need to be animated, creating them in 3D was the perfect way to get the look we wanted. Once the modeling was finished we could position the models in nearly limitless views resulting in more than one rendering on the final package," remarks Tony.

Tony Barone