Ever wondered how the photographs in IKEA catalogues look so impossibly perfect?
Well, you're not the only one. Nor are you the only one to be fooled into thinking they're actually using photographs, because as it turns out, these 'photographs' that the Swedish company uses within their marketing materials are in fact completely faked.
According to a recent article in CG Society, IKEA are quite candid with the fact that around 75% of all the images they use to sell their products are entirely computer generated by a 3D graphics team, instead of using traditional photography.
Using CG artists instead of photography helps to make the process simpler, cheaper and faster.
1.
Instead of spending time, effort and money on prototyping new furniture products and shipping them across the world to be photographed, and then sending them back, the company says it finds it far easier to recreate entire rooms in CG.
Martin Enthed of IKEA explained that the company have a bank of around 25,000 models rendered at "a ridiculously high resolution" of 4Kx4K, in case they ever need to print them on large walls in stores rather than just on the website or catalogues.
Pretty much nothing in this photo actually exists...
2.
The experimentation with using computer generated images began 10 years back in the summer of 2004 and by 2006, IKEA were ready to unveil their piece of furniture that had been fully CG rendered, a chair called “Bertil”.
...and nothing in this either.
3.
And you thought it was just the product names they made up.
[via CG Society]
