beach street
Beach Street was preparing to launch a six product skincare range. The product was still in manufacturing. The marketing calendar was not. Yonick built the range in 3D from physical reference, then delivered more than a hundred finished images and two films in six weeks. Product shots, compositions, bundle packaging, campaign frames. All of it rendered before a single tube existed.
The campaign went live ahead of the product.
Client
Beach Street
Year
2026
Timeframe
6 weeks
Services
3D Design
Motion Design
Asset Production
Tools
Blender
Cycles
Houdini
Da Vinci
00_Overview
Yonick was building a product that did not exist yet, for a launch that could not wait for it.
That set the constraints:
No finished product to photograph, only the nearest physical stock to work from
Six products across two sizes, all needing identical treatment
Assets for the brand's own store, reseller listings, catalogs, and the packaging itself
Six weeks, running parallel to manufacturing rather than after it
And one standard above the rest. These images would sit on a storefront beside real photography. If a single one read as CG, the whole set would.
01_The_Range
01.1_Product_Protography
Six products, two sizes, and every shot the brand needed to sell them. Standing, laying, cap detail, front and back. Each one rendered for the full range under identical light.
01.2_Bundles
Bundles are a separate product line, used to lift order value. The box design needed product photography on it, but neither the box nor the products existed.
So the renders went onto the box design, and then the finished box was rendered in turn. Bundle contents were visualized too, so the product page had more than a single image to sell with.
The carton was rebuilt from a different box in the same paper stock.
01.3_Product_Packaging
02_Derivatives
02.1_Compositions
The same assets arranged as editorial imagery. Catalog and lifestyle came out of one file.
02.2_In_Motion
Two films, built from the same assets. Motion was not part of the brief. Once the products existed in 3D, animating them cost a fraction of building them.
Match cuts between products, raking light to read the label surface, and two simulations of cream in motion.
02.3_Backdrops
Dropped into new environments without a reshoot. The environment changes. The asset does not.
03_The_Asset
Nothing was modeled from a photograph. Beach Street sent physical stock: a previous generation tube in the same metal format, and a separate carton in the same paper. The new packaging did not exist yet, so the closest available material was studied instead.
03.1_Label_Mapping
A cylinder with artwork applied and the top simply flattened distorts wrongly. Type compresses on the sides and stretches across the face.
So the tube was squeezed shut in simulation, pressed between two colliders the way real ones are sealed on the production line. The artwork deforms correctly because the geometry got there the same way.
03.2_Dents_Simualtion
A perfect tube reads as CG immediately. Real ones arrive with small dents from handling and packing, even unopened. So the finished tube was pushed gently from several directions in simulation until it dimpled the way a real one does. Internally the target had a name: five percent crinkled. Full, undamaged, and slightly imperfect.
03.3_Materials_Mixing
Three surfaces, three behaviors: the painted body, the bare metal at the base, and the machined cap. Even the best material libraries have no exact match for a specific product. So each surface was assembled rather than picked. Normal maps pulled from three materials, roughness from two more, then values remapped by hand until the light behaved the way it does in the room.
The asset moved between Blender and Houdini repeatedly without ever being rebuilt, carrying its UVs through every simulation. Shape revisions took hours instead of days.
04_Light_&_Post_Processing
04.1_Consistent_Lighing
The brand direction was sun. Bright, open, high key. Bright and flat is easy. Bright while still holding contrast and surface texture is not. The main shot took a six light setup, built around a product standing on a seamless backdrop. That rig became the reference for everything else. Then the backdrop came out. Without it there was no bounce, and one side of every product fell dark. Each subsequent shot needed its own solving: lights relinked, sources faked, physics quietly bent, all to keep a hundred images looking like they came from one session.
04.2_Post_Production
Each image was run through the same post processing pipeline to add the little imperfetions that usually prevent CG to read as a photograph
05_Beyond_the_Shelf
Some shots would be wasteful, messy, or simply impossible to stage.
A fully crushed tube was simulated by inflating it and then reversing the pressure, collapsing it inward against colliders and distortion forces. Thirty variants were run. Five were chosen, finished by hand, and rendered across the range.
The cream coats were built the same way. Product already dispensed, arranged and brushed into shape, without opening a single tube.
06_Reflection
Beach Street went to market before their product came off the line. The photography did not wait for manufacturing, and the packaging design did not wait for the photography.
What made that possible was building the product rather than shooting it. One asset, studied from physical stock rather than the product itself, and built to hold up under a face close look, then lit once and carried across every image the launch needed. Six products in a single visual language. Catalog, editorial, packaging, and campaign, out of one file.
The expensive part is building the asset. It only gets built once. Christmas, summer, a new market, a new environment: each of those is a render against a file that already exists, rather than a shoot that starts from nothing.
The product does not need to exist. The asset does.
For skincare and beauty brands who need imagery before the product ships, and who would rather every campaign after it started from something that already exists. Let's talk.