At 2 a.m., most office towers in Dongguan are dark, but our render servers are still humming. Designer Aming sits at his workstation, staring at the screen—he just revised a shot for a client who felt the product rotation angle "wasn't elegant enough."
This is the ninth modification today. Rendering itself only takes 40 minutes, but every revision means another export, review, and back-and-forth. Standing behind him, I watched him open the project file, tweak the angle by exactly 3 degrees, and hit render again. In that moment, I asked myself: does a 30-second product showcase video really need four specialists, two weeks, and an entire team's anxiety?
The answer is no. But back in 2019 when we were doing traditional CG commercials, that's how it worked. Modelers, animators, renderers, compositors—each step felt like a relay race. The problem was that the client was always the last to see the result. Change a color, adjust a camera angle, add a caption—and the whole pipeline had to run again. It wasn't a lack of skill; it was a "high-latency" workflow.
So when we first tried AI-assisted product scene generation in 2024, my hands were trembling. A task that used to take five days of environment setup was done in an afternoon. Even more surprising, the AI draft wasn't perfect, but it gave us 30 creative directions—something unimaginable in the past. That night, my technical partner Xie and I talked until 2 a.m. over instant noodles. We came to one conclusion: this time, we had to bet big.
So we made a decision that seemed "a little crazy": we froze all traditional CG projects and went all-in on AI+3D. Some teammates doubted it, some clients waited, and even my mom called to say, "You guys shoot short videos—don't mess around." But we knew that clinging to old workflows would leave us behind. AI+3D was the next stop for product animation.
Eighteen months later, that decision has proven right. We've delivered over 200 product animations, served more than 100 brands, covering 3C electronics, food & beverage, industrial machinery, home & furniture, and beauty & personal care. Last month, we completed a full animation for a precision CNC machine—from modeling to final render in 6 days. In the traditional CG era, that would have taken at least a month.
What you may find surprising is that AI+3D isn't taking jobs from animators—it's liberating them from repetitive labor. Our workflow has been compressed into three steps: ideate, generate, refine. AI quickly produces options, and experienced animators make the final call. As we noted in our 2026 E-commerce Visual Trends Report, in the short-video era, visual content capacity is the moat for brands. AI+3D is digging that moat deeper and faster.
What's next? I believe AI+3D product animation will become as common as product photography. But no matter how technology evolves, our mission remains: to help brands tell their product stories in the most vivid and impactful way. If you're thinking about how AI can upgrade your product visuals, reach out. We can't promise the cheapest price, but we promise every frame will deliver real value to your brand.
