madeby.krisztina — Krisztina Vichnal, CGI & Look Development Artist

Still life, product visualization and set design. Budapest, Hungary.

Krisztina Vichnal is a CGI and look development artist based in Budapest, Hungary, working across still life, product visualization, set design and automotive rendering. Her practice sits between advertising craft and material study: photoreal surfaces, controlled studio light, and compositions built object by object rather than assembled from stock. Every frame starts as a lighting problem and a material problem before it becomes an image.

The work spans commissioned campaign imagery, brand collaborations and self-initiated series. Recurring subjects include beauty and skincare packaging, food and beverage, everyday consumer objects, jewellery, and cars — each treated as a question of surface, reflection and light rather than a product to be flattered. The result is a body of work that reads as photography rather than rendering: physically plausible, restrained, and built for print and campaign use as much as for the screen.

Look development

Look development is the core of the process. Layered automotive paint with flake and clearcoat, glass and liquid refraction, beaded condensation, brushed and anodised metal, glazed ceramic, translucent plastics, paper and cardboard, fabric and skin — each material is authored and tested under multiple lighting conditions before a frame is composed. Shaders are built to hold up under close inspection: edge wear, micro-scratches, fingerprints, dust and subtle imperfection are what separate a render from a photograph.

The same discipline applies to colour. Palettes are kept deliberate and narrow, with the object and its immediate surroundings carrying the tonal weight. Where a campaign calls for a bolder register — the pressed pigment series, or the beauty work — saturation is pushed intentionally, not accidentally.

Set design and studio lighting

Sets are designed rather than dressed. Backdrops, plinths, podiums, glass, fabric and reflective panels are modelled and positioned as they would be on a physical shoot, using the same logic a photographer would apply: softboxes, scrims, flags, gradients and bounce. Working this way keeps the images grounded in real studio behaviour and makes them straightforward to art-direct alongside live-action photography.

Composition is built object by object. Negative space, contact shadows, and the relationship between an object and the surface it sits on carry as much weight as the product itself. Several of the self-initiated series — the egg forms, the toothbrush study, the rock study — exist purely to test that relationship without a brief.

Motion

Alongside stills, the practice includes 3D animation and motion design: product turntables, material transitions, crystallisation and growth simulations, and short-form campaign pieces. The motion work follows the same rule as the stills — camera and light behave as they would on a real set, and the material does the talking.

Clients and tools

Selected clients and collaborations include Microsoft, Porsche, SafePal, Mobilfox and Greyscalegorilla, alongside production and look development work with studio Yambo. Toolset: Cinema 4D, Octane Render, Redshift, Houdini, Substance Painter and Designer, Marvelous Designer, Nuke and the Adobe suite.

Available for commissioned CGI, product visualization, campaign imagery, set design, look development and 3D animation — remotely, and on site in Budapest.

Selected work

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Elsewhere

Enquiries: madebykrisztina@gmail.com