OG Maine Beer Line-Up - Blending CGI and Photography
ROLES
Retouching
| Photography
| Creative
| CGI
CREDITS
Published in Maine Magazine
This image was created for an article in Maine Magazine about the major beers from the four earliest Maine breweries: Geary Brewing, Atlantic Brewing, Allagash Brewing, and Sebago Brewing.
Based on the subject of the article, we pitched an idea featuring the four beers displayed on four pillars of Maine granite — a playful nod to both a museum exhibit and a winner’s podium, with the earliest brewery taking the top spot and the others following in chronological order. Some obvious visual connections and some subtle, second-take nods — our favorite
We didn’t have access to four beer-sized pillars of actual granite, so we created them entirely through CGI. The game plan build the granite pillars in Blender, photograph the beers separately in-studio to match the lighting and perspective, and finally composite everything together in Photoshop.
Final image composite of CGI and Photography
First, we modeled the four pillars in Blender. Since the placement of the different-sized cans and bottles was important for the final composition, we also loosely modeled each can and bottle. This helped us determine the relative heights for the pillars in a way that felt balanced — and let us generate CGI shadows and reflections to speed up the compositing process later.
Base CGI modeling and texturing
Rendering export layers: Base pillar render, Pillar with can/bottle mocks for location, Pillars with can/bottle shadows and caustics/reflections
With the CGI exported as layers, we not only had the base background and shadow layers separately, but also a perfect guide for shooting the beers at the correct perspective. While we can fix a lot in post, perspective isn’t something you want to mess around with too much — so getting it as close as possible in camera was key.
Beer cans/bottles photos shot in studio
(You might notice the Geary's bottle perspective was slightly off and needed a few tweaks at the end — but thanks to the planning, it was close enough to adjust without issue.)
Geary's Pale Ale before/after straight out of camera and cleaned up
The product we received to shoot was pulled straight from shelves, so we didn’t have the luxury of fresh labels or hand-picked cans. All products were photographed, retouched individually to clean up defects and straighten labels, and then composited into the CGI backplate.
Before/after showing CGI and CGI + beer photos composited in
You can see the details of the beer photos interacting with the CGI model better in this close up.
Final composite detail
Once everything was placed, we did final color grading and tweaked the shadows and reflections to make sure the details looked just right. The final image was delivered with extra space on all sides to allow cropping and customizing the negative space for copy. And don’t worry, the quality assurance extended to the beers too — because when we say we care about the details, we mean every detail.
Before/after showing CGI and SOOC photos versus final composite
