CG box art & key art

What the person holding the box is looking for

The image on the box makes the sale. A person standing in a shop two metres from the shelf needs one picture to show both what this aircraft did and where it was when it did it, before reading a single word of the packaging.

Key art is therefore a different problem from a film frame. Within a scene already carrying the story, a film frame only needs to last a few seconds. In print, held in the hand, box art carries the story by itself beside twenty competitors on the same shelf doing the same thing.

From CAD to a subject that survives inspection

Each model starts as a CAD project. Before being rendered in passes for compositing, the model is converted from NURBS to clean topology, then detailed, textured, and lit with an HDRI.

This approach is chosen over painting the subject because buyers assemble the kits themselves and check the panel lines, the markings, and the shape of a fairing against references they know better than most artists do. For that reason, Chumak Studio builds the subject instead of interpreting it, and places the judgement on everything around it.

The world behind it

The world is rendered as a digital matte painting assembled from original reference material and photographs. What matters is not exactness but truth: the correct altitude, weather, and hour from an actual mission.

A Convair B-36 against an ordinary blue sky looks like a render. The same aircraft presented at the altitude where it flew, in the light of the hour when it flew, looks like a record of a real occurrence. The matte painting creates that difference, and that is why Chumak Studio keeps the two service lines together instead of splitting them into separate businesses.

Print behaves differently from screen

Because key art ends up in print, it is produced at print resolution and checked in that medium. Colour appears differently on a press than on a monitor, detail that is clear on screen can disappear into paper, and the crop must survive any packaging treatment: a logo band across the top, a barcode in the corner, a die-cut edge.

The problem is one of colour management before it is an art problem. The International Color Consortium is the publisher of the profile specification that carries a colour from a display to a press, with documentation at color.org; the characterisation data on which much of European print standardisation depends is published by Fogra, the German printing research institute at fogra.org. Which press profile the run uses should be known before the painting starts, rather than at the proof stage.

Ten years of box art for Roden Ltd.

Since 2016, the work done for Roden Ltd. has consisted of aircraft and vehicles, with every subject made from the manufacturer's own data and placed within a painted scene. Published examples on this site include the Convair B-36 Peacemaker, the Douglas C-133B Cargomaster, the Convair NB-36, the Boeing 707 and the Boeing E-3 Sentry AWACS.

Wherever a real object must be placed in an environment, the method works the same way: for a vehicle, a product, or a piece of hardware shown performing the task it was made for.