Shirin Beauty — Product CGI & Animation

Most of my work lives in controlled studio environments. Black backgrounds, isolated products, precise lighting. This project was the opposite. I wanted to put a product in a world and see if the CGI could hold up when there's sand, water, and natural light competing for attention.

The concept is a beach-inspired campaign for a skincare brand. Warm, organic, aspirational. The kind of imagery you'd see in a summer launch or a "clean beauty" editorial spread. But instead of booking a location shoot, a photographer, and a stylist, this was built entirely in Blender on my desk.

The environment was the real challenge. Sand is tricky to get right in 3D because it's millions of tiny irregular shapes catching light at different angles. I used a combination of displacement maps and particle scattering to get the grain texture, then spent time on the wet/dry transition where the water meets the shore. That edge is where the realism lives or dies.

The product itself needed to feel like it belonged in the scene, not composited on top. So the lighting on the bottle matches the environment lighting exactly. The glass picks up warm reflections from the sand. The cream inside reacts to the same color temperature as the sky. When everything shares the same light, the brain stops questioning it.

The animation moves through the scene the way your eye would at a beach. Slow, wandering, settling on the product naturally rather than snapping to it. It's meant to feel discovered, not presented.

This was a technical stretch for me and I'm glad I did it. It proved (to myself, at least) that the same Blender pipeline I use for studio product shots scales to environmental storytelling too.