An Intro to the 3D Industry
3D rendering is an ever-growing industry that has a major part in product design and advertising. It’s highly likely you would have seen content using 3D models whether you realised it or not. With the technology behind the software and skills of the artists always improving, these renders can be incredibly photo-realistic. In some cases to the point where it is almost impossible to tell if they are real or not. Companies opt to use these 3D renders to remove some of the limitations that real life photography presents. Whether that is the positioning, the lighting , or something as simple as no imperfections. You don’t have to worry about dust in a virtual studio. Another advantage is that the watch doesn’t have to exist! Using technical drawings I can create the watch in the software and produce images before we have the physical watch. This allows us to get ahead of the game to market the watch and get a listing created. The Geckota G-02 GMTis a great example for this.
From Graphic Designer to 3D Artist
I first started my creative journey with an interest in graphic design. From about 13 years old, I wanted to have a logo to use as a profile picture across social medias. For example, Twitter and YouTube. As you would expect, they were awful, but you have to start somewhere! From here I started creating random logos and banners for me and some friends. As time went on, I started watching YouTube tutorials and became somewhat of a self-taught designer for content creators. As my interest grew in digital art as a whole I wanted to venture out into other forms of graphics. Therefore, I’ve had a go at pretty much everything from hand lettering to voxel art to mascot logo’s to even illustrations. Nothing gripped me quite like 3D rendering has done. I started at Geckota as a Junior Creative using my Graphic Design knowledge and dabbled in a few different projects for example, newsletters & websites. We then invested in a 3D printer which really marked the start of the 3D design. As no one really had the time to commit to this new endeavour I was eager to get involved. Moreover, I was familiar with the concept of 3D printing simply due to my interest in some art content creators that had used them.3D Printing in the Development Process
The 3D printer we chose to purchase was the Prusa i3 MK3. This is a great beginners choice to get to grips with printing and gets the job done. We have found the 3D printer to be incredibly useful when it comes to our development process of our watches and speeds up the design stage. The core use for this printer comes into play when creating watch cases, bezels and casebacks. So for example, we can design a to-scale technical drawing of a watch case, so for instance, the Geckota G-01 39mm case. Then I can model that in a 3D workspace and then print it off to get a physical model of the case.

Photo-realistic Listing Images
Creating photo-realistic images of our watches is the aspect I enjoy the most, there’s something satisfying about taking an idea and producing a life-like image of it before it even exists in real life. The latest listing I have created using these renders is the Geckota G-02 GMT, using technical drawings I can model, texture, light and render white background (WBG) images and mimic our usual listing photos. The main WBG image is all about accuracy, and representing the watch exactly how it will look like in real life. Be sure to keep an eye on our blog page for a future post with more detail about this specific process. The other images is where 3D really comes into its own, as you don’t have the same limitations as you do in a real studio. Mainly, camera positioning. Take this image for example:


Surface Imperfections
Another advantage to using 3D which can become a disadvantage if you’re not careful, is that you don’t have to worry about real world imperfections, the simplest of things like tiny scratches, bumps and dust are almost unavoidable in real watch photography. These don’t exist in 3D, you can’t accidentally scratch it and dust can’t fall on it! This is where it can become a disadvantage, it can seem ‘too perfect’ and will look fake, just because we are so used to subconsciously seeing these tiny imperfections. 3D artists can make the most of normal, bump and displacement maps to mimic these imperfections to achieve a photo-realistic look.