Eyewear · CGI Motion · 2026
A motion-only CGI eyewear piece built around the hardest thing to fake in render: light passing through a tinted lens — reflection, transmission and refraction, art-directed across every frame of the move.
About the project
Every reflection, on purpose.
The premise
Eyewear is sold on a material that barely exists. A tinted lens is mostly nothing: a surface, a colour, and the behaviour of light passing through it. Get that wrong in CGI and the glasses turn to plastic immediately, which is why so much eyewear imagery is still shot on a table.
We made this piece to take that head on, and to do it in motion rather than in a still. A still lens can be cheated. You tune one frame until it looks right and nobody checks. Move the camera and the cheat shows: reflections slide wrong, refraction detaches from the frame, the coating stops behaving.
So, motion only. No hero still to fall back on. A premium eyewear piece that has to hold across every frame of the move.
Process & methodology
The whole piece rides on the lenses. We modelled the frame and optics in Blender, built the glossy black acetate and the tinted green glass in Substance Painter, and put the work where it shows — transmission, refraction and coating reflections tuned until the lens reads as real tinted glass. Then we lit it with hard, dappled light and moved the camera, so across the whole animation every highlight and shadow lands where we placed it, not where it happened to fall.
Art direction
Two decisions, and the second one is why the piece works.
First, put the budget in the lens. Frame and optics modelled in Blender, glossy black acetate and tinted green glass built in Substance Painter, and then the real work: transmission, refraction and coating reflections tuned until the lens reads as glass and not as tinted plastic.
Second, light it hard. Soft light flatters a product and tells you nothing. We used hard, dappled light, the kind that comes through leaves, because it gives the lens something to do: bright edges to catch, dark gaps to transmit through, a pattern that keeps changing as the camera moves.
Then the camera moves, and that is where the atmosphere comes from. Across the whole animation every highlight and every shadow lands where we placed it, not where it happened to fall.
Outcome
A lens that survives a moving camera survives anything. The shader and the lighting approach carry to any product built on transparency or coating: bottles, watch crystals, visors, screens, instrument glass.
For a brand it means eyewear can be shown before it exists. Colourways, lens tints and frame finishes get swapped in render instead of reshot, and a launch piece can be built from CAD months before the first sample lands.
The piece is motion first because that is where eyewear is sold now. In a feed, in three seconds, moving.
Start a project
We consider each proposal carefully. If there is alignment, we build something extraordinary together.
Location
España