marble.com lifestyle images

Project Overview

Marble.com project needed a constant influx of fresh image content to maintain high SEO strategy requirements. Additionally the new website design also required a substantial amount of high end imagery for the new design. Classic image acquisition process was expensive and complex due to the nature of marble.com product which was kitchen and bathroom countertops, floor tiles, stone wall panels, fireplace surrounds, bathroom tub deck surrounds etc.

Typically to obtain lifestyle images, one needs to arrange a photoshoot at completed house interiors. This requires substantial logistics and coordination. It involved a homeowner to agree to do the shoot, hiring a photographer and staging a house for the photoshoot. Additional complication was the fact that marble.com was not the last of vendors to be involved in a house remodeling, therefore pictures done after completed installation were not possible since a complete interior is usually done some time after countertops are installed. A typical kitchen countertop oriented photoshoot would result with few images of one interior with one stone material. The cost of this process, depending on locations and specific was on average around $5000 per photoshoot.

Project Objectives

The objective of this project was to find a way to minimize cost and increase the amount of images delivered for all marketing and design strategies. Marble.com required a lot of images for social media campaigns, SEO and non-SEO articles, project galleries, static pages, website accent images and many misc. needs.

Other Considerations

Before settling on final strategy, me and my team considered using commercial stock photography. That option turned out to be not viable since amount of unique images with specific countertop stones used does not exist to be purchased. Another option considered was using Adobe Photoshop to swap countertops on stock images. This attempt was better but it required too much labor and it was too expensive.

Final Strategy

My prior experience with 3D imaging helped me with creating a strategy of lifestyle and product imagery creation for marble.com. I decided to use 3D Art to create needed content. I prepared a cost break down for this strategy and the project was approved. The amount of 3D Art needed required in-house 3D Artist team and adequate hardware. I assembled a team of 3D Artists and supervised proper 3D rendering hardware solutions for the task. I created various workflows using JIRA project management software. This project can deliver about 50 to 100 images per week. The quality of 3D Art is equal of sometimes greater than classic photography. The average cost of high resolution image oscillates around 30$ to 50$ for simple and about a $100 per complex image.

Project Structure

Team:

5 3D Artists (all assets overseas at 10$ per hour)

1 Project Manager

1 Assistant Project Manager

Software:

3D Studio Max

V-ray Renderer, Corona Renderer

Atlassian JIRA.

Hardware:

In-house 966 cores, 100 CPU Xeon rendering farm

4x RTX 3080 rendering farm.