About

The need

In 2005 the growing need from our clients to showcase and configure their products using photorealistic images before they existed in thephysical world became pressing. Clients want to promote their products prior to actuallt realizing them as physical objects and 3D is an excellent way of doing that.



This in itself is nothing new; visualizing ideas and products before they exist have been at the heart of computer graphics from the very beginning. However there is a problem of scalibility. As long as there are only a few products, single image orders are great. But what you need images of twenty, fifty, a hundred or more products? Once you can vary your products in a number of ways, the number of combinations increase exponentially and visualizing them all can become costly. What you need then is a configurator.

Package Visualizer 4.0 enables the user to try designs and images on different packages, switch openings and closures, change color, rotate and move the package in 3D and get an instant beauty shot of the current package configuration. In addition to the interactive mode, all images can be downloaded or automatically sent to an email address for further use in presentations, video or print.

The vision

We knew that it would be possible to automate and streamline the work of creating shots of products from a known library. What we needed was hardware and software that allowed lightning fast rending of photorealistic images, and letting them be delievred over the internet without calling for the user to have an expensive hyped up computer. The vision was that anyone should be able to do this, from their own destop or laptop computer.

Looking into what kind of solutions existed, we found that there were a few but very limited options. The technology was lurking around the corner, but not mature yet. Eventually, we found the resource we needed to make this happen and forumlated our vision.

Making it happen

As our idea was presented to Tetra Pak they saw the same possibilities we did. This was the start of what became Tetra Pak’s Package Visualizer 4.0.

The first milestone was to create a library of all Tetra Pak packages, which come close to 300 models. While the main purpose for these models has always been to be used in Package Visualizer, they have also been used in multiple projects we have done for Tetra Pak over the years.



Next this library had to be accessible in an intuitive and easy to use manner, without having to use expensive proprietary software that must be installed on every computer you want to access the service from. It was in everyone’s best interrest that a user should be able to access this service immediately upon showing interrest in it.



The solution was a three-tiered system where the rendering server was the backend, the package database and user administration served as middleware, and a web based appliction that can be used from any ordinary web browser was the frontend.

The result

Package Visualizer 4.0 was released in December 2011 and is an interactive configurator that instantly renders photorealistic images of a package directly in your web browser.



In Package Visualizer 4.0, you can configure a package varying all configurable parameters, such as the carton design, openings and closures, and the color of selected parts. You can rotate and move the package around freely, seeing the changes you make to it in real-time. At all stages in this process you can download an image of the package, delivering a high quality rending of the package right to your email inbox, making it available to be used in for instance presentations and advertising. All of this without having to spend one second thinking what it will cost to create this image; you can do it yourself from any computer, anywhere in the world provided you have Internet access.



Package Visualizer 4.0 is easily scalable as the numbers of users grow, and the technical platform makes it easy to add new features and applications. The project is still ongoing and we are very eager to see how Package Visualizer will evolve over time.