The Yamaha Grand Piano project
Inside Stories >> Stories about work

Motif8 Design approached us to help them recreate visuals from a poster on the Yamaha grand piano from several decades ago. The original poster was a very low LPI print and introduced too many artefacts during digital printing. One of the requirements was this exploded view of the piano.

The original poster was printed in the early 80's, almost 3 decades ago. The client did not have the softcopy and all we recieved was an old printed copy of the poster. One of the requirements from Motif8 was to recreate all the photographs from the poster in photorealistic detail. Here is a shot of the piano body after the craftsmen have formed the initial shape. The image on the left is the original photograph. The one on the right is our render.

and a closeup so you can see some of the wood grain detailing.

We used the net to look for more images on the grand piano and built a basis for our model. The next step was to recreate each and every component of the piano (The end use required an exploded view of the piano and it's parts.)

A wire render of the inner metal frame

And a specular colour render...

All of this was achieved in Blender3d. We now take the model into Kerkythea, a superb FOSS renderer. The piano is now rendered in component layers and all the components are imported into Gimp. These are colour corrected and composited before being output as a high resolution image.

This is a 'clay render' of the finished Piano. We use this to check for structural and lighting anamolies. When everything seems right, we render the actual version with the right surface material.

We absolutely loved working on this project. We have some more Yamaha stuff to show off, but that will have to wait. :) Let us know if you liked this story.