Retail Display or Exhibit Design?

Retail Display or Exhibit Design?

Hello everyone, I recently (and finally) purchased a license to C3D. I'm very excited to find out what everyone else has already known for so long – that Cheetah is indeed an extremely capable modeling/rendering/animating tool!

I am experienced in solid modeling, but very new to subdivision modeling. So I have much to learn.

I just wonder, does anyone here use C3D for Retail Display Design (POP), Packaging, and/or Exhibit/Trade Show Design? If so I would love to see some examples of what I should be able to do in the future. Bonus points if you have even a simple animation.

Thank you

northwoods said:

Hello everyone, I recently (and finally) purchased a license to C3D. I'm very excited to find out what everyone else has already known for so long – that Cheetah is indeed an extremely capable modeling/rendering/animating tool!

I am experienced in solid modeling, but very new to subdivision modeling. So I have much to learn.

I just wonder, does anyone here use C3D for Retail Display Design (POP), Packaging, and/or Exhibit/Trade Show Design? If so I would love to see some examples of what I should be able to do in the future. Bonus points if you have even a simple animation.

Thank you

Click to expand...

Hi and welcome!

I’ve done a few exhibition displays for work and I did one for a freelance job a few months ago. I’m on my phone, so I’ll have to post some images when I’m on my computer.

northwoods said:

I just wonder, does anyone here use C3D for Retail Display Design (POP), Packaging, and/or Exhibit/Trade Show Design? If so I would love to see some examples of what I should be able to do in the future. Bonus points if you have even a simple animation.

Click to expand...

Pretty much of this and in this order:
Boxshot: https://www.cheetah3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6609&highlight=folding
Cardbox folding: https://www.cheetah3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=11458
Display folding: https://www.cheetah3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=11101
Display rendering: https://www.cheetah3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=72463&postcount=27
https://www.cheetah3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=8968
Packaging modelling video: https://www.cheetah3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=89670&postcount=33
From Illustrator to Polygons: https://www.cheetah3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=10080
There´s a lot more but I can´t find it quickly unfortunately.

Cheers
Frank

Here are a few exhibit displays I've done. Most of these were done for my regular day job, so I didn't spend much time on the renders as they were mostly for internal use. The AeroBarrier booth is the most recent one I did for a freelance job. It had two pop up displays placed next to each other, so the customer could move them around depending on booth size.

I had to reduce the resolution to get them down to a size that I can post here. Hopefully these help you some.

Wow I didn't expect much of a response.. Really nice modeling and rendering! Thank you for sharing. The packaging tutorials are very helpful. Rather encouraging for me I might add, as I'm barely scratching the surface of this program.



Ok two more questions here and I apologize that they might not be in the correct sub-forum:



- how do you guys figure out dimensions into all this? As a solid modeler, I'm accustomed to precise dims, but I'm not sure how I can account for something similar here. Is it just 1 unit = 1" or 1 cm?



-I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out how to choose the exact view to render. Whatever I have going on seems to be zoomed in too far and so dark too. Is there a video tutorial somewhere that shows how to render a custom view? I imagine I'm supposed to place a camera somewhere? I tried that to no avail..



Thank you in advance.

northwoods said:

- how do you guys figure out dimensions into all this? As a solid modeler, I'm accustomed to precise dims, but I'm not sure how I can account for something similar here. Is it just 1 unit = 1" or 1 cm?

Click to expand...

I recommend 1 unit as 1m.

Cheers
Frank

frank beckmann said:

I recommend 1 unit as 1m.

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Fantastic, thank you!

You'll find most 3d parametric / box modeling software has it's own internal unit system.

I work in inches, but usually do the same as Frank. Sometimes I work in 1:10 scale and just move the decimal over depending on how accurate I need to be. I generally don't need anything under 1/32" and sometime work on really large scale scenes.

The bigger thing regarding that may be when you import or export meshes into our out of the scene. You'll need to pay attention to what size is coming in and out. Generally I create a unit cube in the app I'm using and then import it into a target app to see what the size different may be. As long as everything is in scale together you should generally be ok. You can use the ruler tool to check inside C3d. If you do a lot of file interchange, you can go into the preference and set an import / export scaling so it will keep that scaling each time you import / export a certain file type. I bring in a lot of vector art from Illustrator, so I have a custom scale set for svg import to make sure the sizes match when I bring them in.

Also be wary about using scaling on meshes. Usually I start off by sizing parametric objects using the entry fields. If you do need to scale objects, go to the Coordinate System settings under the Tools menu. There are a few tools there that I use all of the time.

If you come across any specific problems, you should find some quick help here most of the time.

I'm not sure about your camera problem though. If you only see black in the viewport, you may be zoomed in too much (or your object is really large). You can try selecting the object in the object browser and then click on the focus icon that's in the tray on the top right under the main menu icons.

If you can post a scene file or an image of the problem, we may be able to help better.

Hi Northwood,

* Note on metrics:
* If you need to use US / Imperial standards, it can be useful to deploy a sort of hybrid system. Consider the XZ grid in the viewport to be 1 foot / 12" (or 1 yard / 36"). In the panel "Transport" you can then set the snapping grid to 1/12 (or 1/36) which allows you to shift objects in steps of 1".

* Generally, numeric parameter fields accept the four basic math operators, so entering 1/12 is OK. It just gets converted from a fraction to the decimal equivalent.
* A grid of 1 foot may be quite useful anyway. Lots of the components used in point of purchase design seem to be based on multiples of 300mm, even in the metric EU.

* As to question #2: Please upload some sample .jas zipped.
* I hope that you enjoy working with Cheetah 3D :smile:

Thank you Swizl and Helmut. I'm uploading my test file here. It was just a quick file to see if I could understand how to set up for rendering. Which apparently I could not do properly. Thanks again in advance.

Go Help->Cheetah3d samples->Rendering->Pig.jas and select the HDRI Light from the Objects browser and "copy". Go to your file and "paste". Select Falcon pathtracer as renderer and hit render button. It default renders 100 samples and will finish ca after 40sec depending on your Mac:

Cheers
Frank

frank beckmann said:

Go Help->Cheetah3d samples->Rendering->Pig.jas and select the HDRI Light from the Objects browser and "copy". Go to your file and "paste". Select Falcon pathtracer as renderer and hit render button. It default renders 100 samples and will finish ca after 40sec depending on your Mac:

Cheers
Frank

Click to expand...

Awesome – that did it! Thanks indeed Frank.


btw. What is the difference between using the Falcon vs. Cheetah renderer? Falcon is better?