As a freelance visualisation artist, Spencer Livingstone feels pretty positive about the role of AI in his work, as he tells DEVELOP3D’s Emilie Eisenberg
London-based 3D visualisation artist Spencer Livingstone has a passion for bringing designers’ concepts to life in bright colour and vivid detail. In the process, he plays an important role in their overall design workflows.
“Many product designers will use KeyShot or another software to render things, but they don’t have enough time to make [the renders] look real. So that’s where I come in,” he explains.
“I take prototypes that product designers have made, and I will spend my time visualising them at multiple angles, adding materials and going into lots of depth and detail to make sure that it looks as photorealistic as possible.”
3D rendering and visualisation is expected to be heavily impacted by artifi cial intelligence (AI) – and Livingstone sees positives and negatives to this trend. Although he was initially concerned by the idea that AI could put him out of a job, subsequently seeing how it might be implemented usefully in the design process has persuaded him that it may provide more good than harm. That said, he feels it may not have developed the necessary maturity to do that yet.
“I know that, one day, I will probably be able to take just one picture and AI will be able to do anything with it. But I still think you need someone to input this data. You still need someone like an art director. You’ll need someone to understand how it works, so there’ll always be a place for visualisers like us to be there to input,” he says.
“In the industry we work in, there was at first this idea that maybe everyone’s going to be made redundant. I think it’s come around. There will absolutely need to be people who know how to use that software. And there will absolutely always need to be humans still working alongside it. It’s not going to be something that makes everyone jobless and has factories running itself and designing things and everything like that. It’s not actually that good yet for all of this stuff . So I definitely think the anxiety is a little bit too far in advance for the actual capabilities of AI.”
Set the stage
At KeyShot World 2024 in London, Livingstone presented examples of his work, including lamps and light fittings for Astro Lighting, storage solutions for Joseph Joseph, and advertising content for an environmental start-up working on methane reduction solutions. KeyShot, he explained, is integral to his process for its user-friendly interface and quick formatting of detailed mock-ups.
After completing his Master’s degree in Information Experience Design at the Royal College of Art, Livingstone worked for Derbyshire-based lighting brand Curiousa, using KeyShot to visualise glass lighting designs created by the brand’s design team. “I concentrated more on visualisation at that point, to which I thought, ‘Okay, is this a career? Should I start to build my visualisation portfolio?’”
The answer to that question was clearly, ‘Yes’. Following his role at Curiousa, Livingstone worked at Astro Lighting, a British lighting manufacturer providing lighting for hotels and retailers including John Lewis. When a vacancy at Joseph Joseph became available, friends who worked in the industry reached out to him on LinkedIn, thinking that he’d be a good fit for the role. That’s where he’s been working ever since, building up his contacts and getting ready to make the shift to freelancing full-time. At Joseph Joseph, Livingstone built a 3D asset library of packaging, products and promotional content.
When it comes to his process, Livingstone avoids sketching and uses ideas he sees on Instagram and Pinterest for inspiration, skipping straight to the 3D mock-up stage.
“The reason I don’t like sketching is because it’s frustrating. I couldn’t get the ideas in my head onto paper. No matter how much I could see this perfect object in my head, every time I sketched, all the proportions would be wrong, and it just didn’t work,” he explains.
“I just started mocking stuff up in 3D. I feel I’m quicker at mocking up stuff in 3D than I am sketching. I don’t have to fill out all the edges and make it render-ready. I just want to have an idea of what it looks like. So I iterate an idea through CAD.”
He uses a combination of software for diff erent aspects of the design process, including Blender, Autodesk 3DS Max and Adobe InDesign, but KeyShot remains the easiest and most effective in Livingstone’s opinion. “I never really stick to one software. I always try to dabble in others,” he says.
“I definitely stick to KeyShot, Fusion and 3DS Max, because you get so many different add-ons where you can do simulations. And I want to start using tyFlow as well, because that uses simulations for water and cloth.”
Going solo
Livingstone’s freelance business, S.VIII, is already over six years old, but his imminent departure from Joseph Joseph will make this the fi rst time he has ever been fully self-employed.
“I’m trying to stick to what I’m really good at, as a good foundation, such as products, interiors, smaller animations where things are moving around. But I definitely want to get into the realms of doing stuff that’s more simulated, so more cloth and so on. It’s just going to depend on what kinds of clients I work for,” he says.
“I always want to make sure that whatever I’m doing for a client is as far as I can go, always at the pinnacle and always pushing. Whatever I do for a client, I want to try to learn something from every project. So far, it’s sticking to my bread and butter – products, interiors, animations – but I’m defi nitely hoping that I can work with some really cool people and try some new things in the future.”
Despite AI’s inevitable influence in the 3D visualisation industry, Livingstone still sees his role based around traditional visualisation methods and human input. After all, in the end, it’s the human eye that his work is trying to convince is real.
This article first appeared in DEVELOP3D Magazine
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