Since 3d jewellery imagery usually looks very fake and bad quality, or this very “clean” and kitschy, cheap look, I worked hard to offer something better and more beautiful like a painting.

Jewellery photography is the hardest product photography in the world.

3d jewellery rendering is the hardest product rendering in the world and the most technically challenging thing to do. A lot of things are not even technically possible to this day.

Many 3d studios’ workflow is based on producing an animation, which means that they have to cut down every possible calculation, material, and texture, create shortcuts and cheats otherwise it would take them months or years to render one with thousands of frames. (Or spend hundreds of thousands on cloud farms)

Therefore producing just one frame would look less realistic because what is good for animation, is not the best for a single image.

My workflow is around creating single images, so I can put as much detail and calculations as possible onto one image, I want to experiment and explore, make the lighting, and compositions and craft them accordingly. Push the rendering engine to its limits without caring about rendering times. Which in my case can be pretty hectic, from 6-8 up to 40-60 or even 100-150 hours for one image. Not to mention the previous workdays that went into the concept, sketching, modelling, testing and experimenting and the post-processing. And things never go as expected, being a 3d artist means you almost always have to deal with technical bugs and constantly debugging and solving them.

And I don’t care about speed or being “cost-efficient”.

So much time and energy just to get one beautiful image?

Yes.