Product design rendering techniques you should master

In this article, you will learn:

• The rendering techniques used in product design
• The rendering process for product design renderings
• Tips & tricks to improve your product design renderings
• How to select the best software for product rendering

If you're aiming to enhance or refine your 3D product visualization techniques, you’re in the right place. In this article, we’ll explore some of the most effective strategies for creating high-quality product renders. This guide builds upon the concepts introduced in the article, What is product rendering, serving as a valuable resource for any artist looking to master the art of product visualization.

Achieving attractive product renders is a specialized process. Rendering artists are continually seeking to refine their techniques and optimize their workflows, enabling them to enhance their artwork consistently.

Understanding the rendering techniques used in product design

Product design is a broad discipline. Some artists specialize in a single industry—such as automotive, furniture, or technology—where tools, methods, and techniques can vary greatly. However, mastering multiple techniques equips you to tackle a wider range of project challenges with confidence.

When approaching a product rendering project, it’s essential to first categorize it, then determine the most effective workflow, techniques, and tools to achieve the best results.

What are the main rendering techniques in product design?

The main rendering techniques used in product design are handmade sketch-style rendering, minimalist, contextual, interactive, and photorealistic rendering.

When discussing rendering in product design, it is essential to consider the stage of product development. Visualizations may be required from the very beginning of the design process—during concept exploration and prototyping—through material testing, animations, and simulations, and ultimately for producing high-quality images used in promotion and marketing.

• Handmade sketch-style rendering: In industrial design, new products usually start with conceptual sketches and basic volume explorations. 3D modeling software helps designers define these initial forms, which are essential for approval before moving on to physical prototypes. These sketches and volumes are often included when presenting ideas to directors, investors, or clients, as they create visual interest and foster an emotional connection from the start. Adding these artistic renderings can further enhance presentations, making them clearer and more visually appealing.

• Minimalistic renderings: They focus on simplicity and clarity, using clean elements and a limited color palette to avoid visual overload and emphasize only what is essential. This approach often conveys a sense of elegance and sophistication. By highlighting key aspects such as shape, form, and material, minimalism makes it easier to compare different design options. These renderings are versatile and can present any product without distractions or unnecessary details. Typically, they rely on straightforward lighting and rendering setups, ensuring the product itself remains the focal point.

• Contextual rendering: Contextual renderings place a product within a real-world environment, making them essential in product design. They allow designers, developers, and stakeholders to visualize how a product will look and perform in its intended context. These types of 3D product renderings are especially valuable in marketing, as agencies often request them to create impactful promotional materials that boost sales and help customers picture the product in their own space. From a technical perspective, contextual renderings can be challenging, requiring not only strong CG skills but also knowledge of directing and storytelling. Collaborating with filmmakers on these projects can provide valuable technical and artistic insights.

• Interactive rendering: Interactive rendering is a real-time process that lets users manipulate and explore 3D visualizations with instant feedback. It enables companies to create immersive product demos where customers and stakeholders can virtually interact with a design. Unlike traditional rendering, which may take minutes or hours per frame, interactive rendering updates immediately, making optimization a key challenge for CG artists. Assets must be carefully prepared with lightweight 3D models, efficient shading, and optimized textures to ensure a smooth experience.

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• Photorealistic rendering: The ultimate goal of many 3D artists is to achieve photorealistic renderings so convincing that they are indistinguishable from real photographs. Major firms, agencies, and product design companies rely on these images to communicate ideas clearly and market projects effectively. Creating photorealistic renders requires accurately simulating real-world lighting, materials, textures, and cameras. Your benchmark is always a real photo, so patience and practice are key. Mastery takes time, but the results can elevate your work to a truly professional level. 11 tips for lighting renderings to boost realism.

Now that we've covered the different types of renderings, let's look at the process required to bring any of these techniques to life.

Product rendering process

In the last article, we reviewed the process of creating a product rendering. An important component of this process is project information, which helps us propose and improve the product and keep our processes organized.

Best practices for efficient rendering workflows

Plan and conceptualize the product design before starting the rendering process. Don't make the mistake of starting a project in your 3D application; this is an easy way to be led to a conceptual dead end. Instead, start drawing ideas and diagrams that give you many routes to explore.

How to optimize rendering for faster results

Use rendering software that utilizes state-of-the-art new technology to deliver high-quality results efficiently. V-Ray, for example, is one of the most flexible rendering engines on the market today. Its ability to use and/or combine different hardware considerably speeds up processes without sacrificing quality.

If you are an owner of the latest generation of GPUs, you can take advantage of V-Ray's high processing speed. You’ll be surprised at how quick it can be, especially in product design rendering. These projects typically involve small scenes that don’t demand a lot of memory, making GPU rendering an ideal choice for production.

Another very useful alternative to speed up the rendering processes is cloud rendering. Chaos Cloud rendering offers a powerful solution and artist-friendly handling. If you need to render sequences or many images simultaneously, cloud rendering will be your best partner.

Tips & tricks from experts to improve your product renderings

• Use photographic references of real life to compare your renderings. They are your real competitors.
• The product is the main actor in the scene. Focus on it and avoid wasting time on secondary objects or elements.
• Lighting and composition are the keys to achieving stunning and photorealistic renderings. Study lighting for product shots.
• Make tests with a few small-sized renders and post-process them before choosing the final image.
• Global illumination represents the product at its best in interior scenes. With isolated objects in the scene, turn GI off and speed up the rendering process.
• Ask for feedback. Friends or colleagues can contribute perspectives and opinions that we may be overlooking, missing the chance to create our best work.

Key features to consider when selecting software

Modern artists must use various software tools to complete their projects. These tools offer specific solutions, allowing artists to save time to achieve the client's demands and tight deadlines. Many of these clients are advertising agencies with challenging ideas and strict requirements for every product detail.

Modeling software

We all have our preferred software—the one we’re most skilled in—and often, a single modeling program is enough to complete an entire project. Personally, I rely on 3ds Max; its polygon modeling technique is incredibly versatile and can handle nearly any 3D geometry.

It's also good to be flexible when it comes to 3D modeling software. Leave your comfort zone and venture into new tools. Consider using parametric software, such as Rhinoceros or Solidworks, that allows you to control precise geometries (for example, Curves and NURBS).

Marvelous Designer is one of the best pieces of software for creating fabric pieces. It can save you a lot of headaches and long development times in other software.

Sculpting software can seem challenging to use, but it can make a big difference in the results and delivery times of your projects. Zbrush is essential software and very useful for food, jewelry details, and engravings.

Dynamics and fluid simulation software

In product design, we commonly find packaging that contains liquids, ground foods, or small items such as cookies or candies.

Many advertising agencies ask artists to render these products interacting with their content. And what about if a video or animation is required? Making dynamic simulations of objects with gravity effects and collisions is common, we need tools that allow us to achieve these effects practically and simply.

Chaos Phoenix is ​​a friendly software for artists looking to solve these effects. As product rendering artists, it is always worth having a little knowledge of these tools to create attractive images or animations.

Software for shading and texturing

Materials and textures are an essential part of achieving different styles of product rendering, from photorealistic to conceptual. In addition, experimenting with different materials is fundamental in the design process and during the development process of a visualization project.

Production renderer engines offer a wide variety of shaders to build very detailed materials, even procedurally. Many projects can be completed with these shaders. However, there are projects in the industry that require very specific characteristics in their materials and textures, such as handling holograms, composite labels, engravings, or even controlled imperfections.

Solutions such as Substance 3D Painter allow you to create PBR materials and textures ideal for all types of projects and geometries. V-Ray also has an AI material generator that can create seamless PBR textures from a reference image, ideal for secondary materials. For more detailed information on the subject, check out our article on What is PBR.

Rendering software

Finally, the tool that will bring it all together: the 3D rendering software. When choosing the rendering software, we must consider two important aspects: first, a rendering engine that is capable of integrating even the most advanced workflows, and second, user-friendly handling.

Remember, the development of a visualization project may involve the use of different tools. Your rendering engine must be capable of integrating with the most popular 3D applications in the industry, as well as being compatible with the industry's standard formats.

And, last but not least, an easy-to-use rendering engine. When you find this combination in a renderer, the magic comes easily, because a powerful and friendly tool allows you to create more in less time, it's simple.

Conclusion

Using different rendering techniques offers several benefits, such as the ability to create more realistic or stylized images depending on the needs of the project. For CG artists, versatility is essential to solving specific needs, whether in the various phases of a product's development or for very common situations, for example, facing the tightest delivery deadlines with clients.

FAQs on product rendering

How to create realistic material textures for product design renders?

• Start by studying the real-world material you want to replicate — its color, reflectivity, roughness, and the behavior under lighting. 
• Use high-quality texture maps such as diffuse/albedo, roughness, bump, and normal maps in your 3D software. 
• Combine procedural and image-based textures for added realism.
• Test your materials under the same lighting conditions that will be used in the final render. 
• Small details like scratches or imperfections can make a big difference in achieving photorealism

What are the product design rendering techniques for e-commerce websites?

For e-commerce, product renderings should be clear, accurate, and visually appealing to help customers make informed decisions. Common techniques include photorealistic rendering to show true colors and materials, turntable or 360° renders for interactive viewing, and isolated product shots on neutral backgrounds for consistency. Optimizing lighting, reflections, and shadows ensures the product looks realistic while keeping file sizes manageable for fast web loading.

What is the role of post-processing in enhancing product design renders?

Post-processing allows you to refine and elevate your 3D renders after they are generated. Using software like Photoshop or even inside the renderer’s frame buffers, you can adjust color balance, contrast, exposure, and saturation, add subtle effects like glow, chromatic aberrations, or sharpen and blur, and remove any imperfections. This stage enhances realism, emphasizes key features of the product, and ensures that the final image communicates the design clearly and attractively.

How to render product designs with realistic reflections and refractions?

Creating believable reflections and refractions is essential for achieving photorealism in product design renders. These details help materials like glass, metals, and plastics look natural and convincing, adding depth and credibility to your visuals. To achieve this:

• Use a physically-based render engine with fine-tuned ray tracing settings to get accurate reflection and refraction behavior that enhances realism. 
• Use physically-based rendering (PBR) materials, assigning accurate materials with proper reflectivity settings.
• For transparent materials like glass or liquids, adjust the index of refraction (IOR) to match the real-world counterpart.
• Ensure your scene has realistic lighting and environment reflections. 

What are the key differences between photorealistic and stylized product renderings?

Photorealism and stylization serve different purposes in product visualization, and understanding their differences helps designers choose the right approach for each project.

• Photorealistic renderings strive to replicate reality as closely as possible. They use advanced lighting setups, accurate material definitions, realistic textures, and precise proportions to create images that are virtually indistinguishable from real photographs. This approach is widely used in marketing, advertising, and client presentations, where the goal is to showcase the product exactly as it will appear in the real world. 
• Stylized renderings, by contrast, focus on artistic expression and conceptual communication rather than strict accuracy. These images may use simplified geometry, non-realistic colors, or dramatic lighting to emphasize a product’s design language. Stylization is often employed in the early design stages or conceptual pitches, where creativity and mood take priority over realism. 

What are the most popular rendering engines used by industrial designers?

In industrial design, 3D modeling software such as Rhinoceros 3D, SolidWorks, 3ds Max, and Blender is commonly used. When choosing a rendering engine, you need to make sure that it works seamlessly with your 3D software. Here are five production-proven rendering engines used by industrial designers: 

1. V-Ray — Industry standard engine for photorealistic rendering, widely used with 3ds Max, Blender, SketchUp, and Rhino.
2. Corona — Known for its simplicity and ease of use, Corona is seamlessly integrated with 3ds Max and Cinema 4D.
3. KeyShot — A specialized rendering software for product visualization, perfect for standalone furniture pieces.
4. Redshift — Redshift is a high-performance, GPU-accelerated renderer designed for speed and efficiency, offering photorealistic results in product design.
5. Blender Cycles — Blender’s ray-tracing render engine, it’s free and open source. It produces high-quality and physically accurate results.