Director/designer Joey Camacho (aka Raw & Rendered) takes Stash readers deep into his creative and technical process for crafting spectacular CG films for two very limited edition Tiffany & Co. pieces by designer Jean Schlumberger.

Joey Camacho: “I was supplied a fairly open-ended brief which asked how to re-imagine the surreal, inspiring world of Jean Schlumberger’s Blue Book 2023: Out of the Blue collection – jewelry designs that are not mass produced or available in retail stores – they take hundreds (or thousands) of hours to create by hand.

“I didn’t have physical references to work from since Tiffany’s Paris high jewelry team was still making them. I had to work on design and animation in parallel from incoming photo-references and CAD files. But the CAD did not represent the actual finished physical versions so I handcrafted my own versions using a variety of Cinema 4D tools.
 

“Building the environments and assets to support such detailed and beautiful jewelry took a lot of care. I wanted everything to feel like it had been touched by jewelry but still feel organic.”

 
“For the gemstones, getting colors and materials right was paramount, so I researched them all to get scientifically accurate refractions and color references, but even then I used Cryptomatte for compositing and grading after renders went out. The use of Redshift’s user data nodes were also incredibly helpful in adjusting gemstone features (IOR, color, roughness) without the need to adjust multiple materials.

“Building the environments and assets to support such detailed and beautiful pieces took a lot of care. I wanted everything to feel like it had been touched by jewelry but still feel organic. Silver and gold patterns naturally seep into the kelp, tendrils, rocks, shells and coral. This was all done with Redshift by layering up different Maxon noises, imperfections and procedural effects.

“The assembly of the Anemone Bracelet was quite a challenge, as each internal pearl served as a slight rotational point for the prong setting and diamond. When wearing the bracelet, and rotating the wrist, the prongs move and rotate slightly, emulating the tentacles of an actual anemone.

“The organization of the supplied CAD model grouped things according to material, so reorganizing everything required intensive manual labor. I had to break each element out individually and regroup them together again, setting a new pivot point so they could react and rotate according to procedural noises/fields. It’s a subtle effect, but well worth it.”

Watch the process reel:
 

 
 

 
Client: Tiffany & Co.

Production: Raw & Rendered
Director/animator: Joey Camacho

Sound design: Jason Klos

Toolkit: Cinema 4D, Redshift, DaVinci Resolve