Senior 3D Product Render Artist

The Role

We'd like to conduct an experiment. Visit dbrand.com. Take a leisurely scroll through our product displays. Now, try to guess which images you saw were real-life photography and which were renders.

If you're struggling, it means we did a good job. If you aren't, you might be able to do an even better one.

We're looking for a Senior 3D Product Render Artist: someone who can take a raw CAD file from our Industrial Designers and turn it into an image asset so convincing that tech publications are fooled into believing we got early iPhone access. Someone who owns every render from raw STEP file to final frame. Most importantly, someone who doesn’t need an Art Director looking over their shoulder during the process.

That individual probably works in-house at a consumer hardware brand right now. Or at least, the agency that brand hired. Maybe they're in deep with the concept render community, dreaming up devices that don't exist yet, but look real enough to get confused for actual hardware leaks. Or perhaps they're topping the charts on ArtStation's Industrial & Product Design channel. To be perfectly honest, we don't particularly care what they're doing right now. We care about what they can do here, for us.

Do the above paragraphs describe you? Of course not. You don't work here... yet. But if you have the skills we need, you certainly could.

The Environment

Still here? Excellent. dbrand thrives where other eCommerce companies have failed because our customers enjoy an uncanny degree of commitment, engagement, and access from us. Maintaining an internal culture of excellence, the likes of which our highly-engaged audience demands, is critical to dbrand's current and future success.

As our Senior 3D Product Render Artist, your work will be scrutinized. Not just by us, but by our millions of customers, site visitors, and social media followers. Remember: our audience owns the exact devices you're rendering. They know what the chamfer looks like, how the anodization plays with the light, and whether the colour on their screen matches the device in their hand. They also have opinions. Strong ones, posted publicly, with a high degree of visibility. Get something wrong and you'll hear about it within seconds of publication.

Your role is to make sure they never get the chance. You'll live within our Photography team, feeding renders to our website, social channels, video projects, and packaging. You'll work with our Graphic Designers and Software Engineers to animate product pages, and with our Videography team to build 3D scenes and motion graphics. Full pipeline, start to finish: refine, shade, layout, light, render - and even animate, when the brief calls for it.

Agility is key. During peak seasons, you might be staring down the barrel of 1,000 renders spanning the launch calendars of Apple, Google and Samsung. Every one of them has to be both perfect and on time. Brute force won’t get you there. What will: scene systems, procedural shaders, render templates, and a pipeline where the first SKU takes hours and the second takes minutes. The question isn’t whether you can render 1,000 assets - it’s whether you can build the machine that does, then spend your time on the hero shots that matter.

Agility cuts the other way, too. Sometimes, speed is more important than perfection. Picture this: a new phone leaks. The creative team sparks an idea for a social media post… but we don’t have an asset to use. We get on a 5-minute call to talk about the idea. You disappear for a few hours into Blender. Next thing you know, we've turned stills for a product page into a million views on an Instagram Reel.

At times, you’ll spend the better part of a week building a hero animation that has to survive frame-by-frame scrutiny from an audience on Reddit who obsesses over the device. Other days, the brief might be “if we post this by EOD, it’ll probably go viral.” Both are the job. The trick is being able to switch gears depending on the requirements.

At dbrand, your renders won't die in a slide deck. They'll be the first thing millions of people see when a new iPhone drops, and the last thing our competitors see before they fail to copy your work. Let's see if you've got what it takes…