3D Real-Time Is Bringing the Sex Appeal and Magic Back to Advertising, It’s Time to Get on Board

Image credit: Zan via Unsplash

Settled down to prepare your timesheets and ever-stricter budgets for 2024? Already feeling a knot in your stomach at the thought of staying late in the office for the rest of the year? Looking at a packed diary of meetings about meetings? Endless feedback loops? Waiting for production partners to deliver the goods? Struggling to remember why you took the job as a creative in the first place?

Advertising used to be fun. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

3D real-time is here to save the day. The tools you need to do your very best work, wow your clients and *gasp* enjoy your job as a creative are there now for all to use.

Nvidia’s Omniverse and Real-time 3D engines such as Unreal Engine are already revolutionising advertising (and creatives' lives) and this will only continue into 2024. These aren’t ‘maybes’ or fanciful Tomorrow’s World wackiness, these ARE the future…and the future is now. 

Realtime 3D isn’t a gimmick - the ways it can positively affect working practices, the creative process, and even the planet are incredibly far-reaching. Whatever the size or structure of your current workplace, the tools you need to recapture your mojo are there ready to slot into place.

3D real-time is bringing the fun back into the Creative’s role, where you can work at the speed of thought, rather than being beholden to production timelines. Imagine you had the tools (and the time) to brainstorm ideas with people around the world as imaginative and positive as you are. It’s the dream job you’d forgotten you had.

It sounds great, right? Impossible but great. Until you’ve seen a photo-realistic motorway lifted up, twisted around and placed at a completely different angle so that the sun reflects in a more pleasingly aesthetic way off the cars which look like they’ve been taken straight from a showroom. You’d be forgiven for thinking that. But this is what can be achieved with just a few clicks of a mouse. What’s more, the results are there in front of you to see instantly - no shuttling away hard drives and promises of ‘something for you to look at’ in a few weeks. You’ll actually have time to see, to think, to feel the work. To imagine more.  

These technologies take you back to being a kid in a sandbox again - it's like taking the creative gloves off. You can test out ideas and see instant results, working at the speed of thought with no impact on your time or budget. 

Here’s how the creative director of EE’s recent campaign, which utilised Unreal engine reacted:

​​Björn Conradi, creative director, Digitas said, “At one point we joined a live session to review a version of the floating island. It looked absolutely fantastic, but the colour palette was too close to some of the other executions and had to change drastically. This is obviously a ton of work when you have just built an entire world. I tried my best to deliver the feedback as delicately as possible. Still, before I could finish my sentence, they changed some parameters on the time of day and position of the sun, and it was done immediately. Working in Unreal is not so much 3D design as it is being a God in a world of your own making.”

Real-time 3D allows for completely remote collaborations, wherever you are in the world. The necessity to up sticks and relocate to London, sell your organs and live in a shed is gone. 

The work you do has real value - the assets you create live forever in your library, ready to be refreshed and repurposed for future campaigns, letting you pick up where you left off or make the slightest adjustments so that your UK ad suddenly becomes seamlessly adapted for the Romanian market. You save time, of course, but you’re also saving the planet, eradicating the need for one-use sets, international travel and the vagaries of the British weather. It’s as if the stars have aligned and the world is a purple-skied Utopia…

…and if you need a few more stars, it only takes a couple of clicks.