As our business continues to grow in both manpower and clientele, we often think back and look at how far we’ve come over the past few years. Our team has almost tripled in size in three years and now consists of talented individuals who hold backgrounds in photography, design, 3D visualisation, interior design, marketing and web management. Our Managing Director, Rob Walker, has seen how the furniture industry has transformed over the last couple of decades. With a background in furniture photography, Rob saw first hand the issues that arose with traditional furniture photography, way before CGI was an accessible way for all businesses to have new imagery.
Seeing the issues traditional photography has, and seeing the downward path it seemed to be following, Rob took a leap when opening a design and advertising agency, which later developed into Orbital Vision as we know it today. Many CGI agencies who offer imagery for furniture and interiors come from an architectural background. As the software used for 3D rendering is used by much of the interiors industry, a lot of other agencies lack realism when it comes to furniture as they have learnt CGI by building, well, buildings. This means a lot of imagery will lack the finesse of the softer textures which are needed to make furniture and interiors look realistic. Over the past few years we have spent most of our time focusing on building fabrics, making them look as realistic as possible - to the point where even some of our team can’t tell whether a final image is a render or a photograph.
With such a huge gap in the market for all businesses to have access to incredible imagery, the way forward was clear - focus on interiors and furniture. Which is exactly what we did! Our team has spent the last few years perfecting our skills when it comes to even the trickiest of textures, which is exactly why we focus purely on the interiors industry.
Part of the Orbital journey was when the team jumped from Rob’s traditional photography background to trying something new, which acted as their middle ground between photography and CGI. A few years ago when CGI wasn’t as common, many businesses would use a combination of photography and Photoshop to manipulate fabric files to make it look like they were upholstered onto furniture models. Along with the trusted ‘colour replace’ tool, Photoshop essentially allowed you to create furniture cut-outs by manipulating a piece of fabric to repeat across said model. However, it never quite hits the mark in realism and is always a long, slow and costly process.
A lightbulb moment for the team was a few years ago when they were working on a project for Sleepeeze. They found that using the trusted Photoshop method just wasn’t working, they were struggling to make the models look realistic so they looked into CGI and 3D rendering. Not only did Sleepeeze want product cut-outs, they also wanted to see their new beds in roomsets, making the task increasingly difficult to achieve through Photoshop alone. After mocking up some shots in CGI, they found that the 3D route was quicker, more cost effective and the results were a lot more realistic - and the team have never looked back! Our CGI capabilities have only gotten better and with an expanding team, our skill sets are only growing.
Since the Sleepeezee project we have worked with some amazing clients from all around the world on some spectacular projects, we’ve rendered hundreds of thousands of images, built hundreds of roomsets and thousands of fabrics and furniture models. We have won awards in Interiors Monthly and in 2021 we won ‘Best for Innovation’ in the Furniture News Reader’s Choice Awards. After investing in better tech, a better office space and a larger team, we have seen our business grow and change for the better. We now also offer our clients animations, 360’s, a fully functioning product customiser and help with marketing and ecommerce. Those of our team who’ve been with us from the very start have seen the business transform into a one-stop-shop for clients where we can produce everything they need to sell a product online.
