Period
April 2024
Client
LG H&H
Role
3D
Art Direction
Compositing
Tools
Cinema 4D
Redshift
Photoshop
01
Issue 23
Magazine cover · shipped
02
6+ assets
Typography · liquid · character
03
First Redshift prod
Renderer switched mid-deadline
04
Role widened
AI content intern → cover author
01
Chapter — The Origin
A brand-new magazine,
no visual language yet.
Surface brief: "make 3D assets for the cover." Real problem: STAAACK was in its first setup phase. No shared visual language, no agreed mood, no reference set — and the 3D would sit on top of live photography, where any optical or mood mismatch would break the cover.
Mood coherence wasn't something to inherit. It was the actual brief. Two upstream choices made it solvable: go to the photo set in person, and learn the team's renderer (Redshift) inside the project deadline.
Step · 01
Read the mood
from the set itself.
Spent the shoot day on set at the photo studio. Watched the lighting rigs, the surface materials, the color temperature, the prop choices. The 'mood' wasn't a moodboard pulled from references — it was the physical light hitting actual objects in a specific room. The 3D had to match that, not a render preset.
Method · on-set observation as the brief
Step · 02
Pick Redshift,
learn it on the clock.
The studio pipeline ran on Redshift; I had been on Octane. Switched renderers mid-project and learned the shader logic from scratch inside the deadline. The hardest piece was the transparent liquid — refraction and reflection had to be authored as separate passes so both would still read at cover scale.
Tool · Redshift, first production use
Step · 03
Compose for the photo,
not for the 3D.
Six-plus assets — typography, liquid, character, bubble, dollar stack — built to drop into a live photographic plate. Each one was lit, color-graded, and framed so it would read as if it had already been on the table when the shutter clicked. The final cover is a composite, not a render.
Output · 6+ assets, one composite cover
02
Chapter — Craft
Craft 01 · transparent liquid
Refraction one pass,
reflection another.
Craft 02 · character + bubble
Tone for the cover,
not for the render.
03
Chapter — The Final Piece
Takeaways.
Issue 23 of STAAACK shipped on schedule with the cover landing as a clean composite of one live photo and six-plus 3D assets. The full issue lives at lgcare.com/staaack.
After the issue closed, the manager said, "you have a lot of range." The line stuck because it didn't refer to taste — it referred to the fact that the same person had read the set, learned a new renderer, and shipped the cover inside one cycle.
Reflection — going one step deeper into the tooling (Octane → Redshift, render preset → refraction/reflection split) is what redrew the job description. The deliverable was a cover; the takeaway was that depth in one pipeline widens what counts as your role.
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