Lime, Sand and Driftwood: Building the Hey Dude x Corona Look in 3D

Corona is one of the easiest brands to recognise and one of the hardest to fake. The look is a lime, sun on sand, a bit of driftwood and a sense that nobody is in a hurry. For the Hey Dude x Corona shoe collaboration we made two films, a teaser and a launch piece, and four meticulously modelled shoes sat inside that world.

Natural materials are a harsh test in 3D. Metal and plastic forgive a lot, because the eye accepts clean surfaces. Sand, bark and citrus do not. Each one has a scale of detail that has to read at a glance and still hold up when the camera moves close. Get the grain of the driftwood wrong and the whole beach looks like a set.

A cut lime is a good example. It is wet, translucent and slightly uneven, and the light has to pass into the flesh instead of bouncing off it. That is why we treat it as a material problem before it is an animation problem. If a lime wedge falling through frame looks right, the viewer stops questioning everything around it.

The shoe has to survive the same scrutiny. A product film lives or dies on whether the product looks like something you could pick up, so the modelling and texturing of the shoes got as much attention as the scene. Fabric weave, stitching and sole texture all need to be believable next to a real-looking beach, or the shoe looks pasted in.

The project covered concept design, 3D modelling, texturing, animation, scene creation, rendering and composition, which is how most of our 3D work runs. One team carrying the idea from sketch to final grade keeps the colour and lighting consistent from the first shot to the last.

The lesson we keep coming back to is simple. Pick the two or three materials that define a brand, and spend your time there. A relaxed brand does not mean relaxed craft. If you want to see the rest of the Hey Dude work, the case study sits on our work page.