How to create a packaging design concept, from branding to 3D render

My name is Tony Parez-Edo, I’m from Paris and I’ve been working as a freelance product designer for the last 5 years. I would define myself as a Global designer, as I prefer to offer a global vision for a product concept or a design vision.

I have always been very curious to learn the Substance 3D tools from Adobe. The Substance 3D team approached me with the idea of creating a 3D packaging and product design concept. I worked on a chocolate bar concept and brand identity. The idea was to offer a global vision of a concept besides using the Substance 3D software.

The Design Concept

Before working on the packaging, I think about the product, and before thinking about the product, I think about the story.

The story I developed revolves around urban living and people’s quality of life. Quality of life in cities includes multiple aspects, such as job opportunities, cultural activities, education, safety, but also the presence of nature.

Nature contributes to biodiversity and social connections. So, the main story originated here, in nature and quality of life. How can we create a concept and packaging that contributes to biodiversity and social connections?

The chosen concept was that of a chocolate bar that uses locally produced honey from urban parks to replace the sugar and the butter. It connects local artisans, the chocolate maker, and the beekeeper.

The packaging is contributing to biodiversity as it is partially made of seeded paper, which is the main concept of the packaging. You can plant it on your terrace or balcony, or even on the street or parks, and with some water new flowers will grow and bloom.

This contributes to biodiversity and the honey gives the taste of the next chocolate bar made by the local beekeeper.

This concept is unique in the way it can be reproduced in urban parks all over the world, and therefore really ties in each product variation with local nature and urban environments.

This also brought up the challenge of scaling this product concept worldwide. I had to make it clear that this was a global brand, but I couldn’t travel for photoshoots around the world. This is where the Generative Background feature (beta) in Substance 3D Stager was super useful, as I could generate recognizable backgrounds from different locations around the world to use for my product renders.

Being able to set up my scene in Stager and then quickly iterate on generating the background that matched my vision.

The workflow

I used Illustrator to make some first illustrations of the project and the vision. Then I used Adobe Capture for color palette inspiration, Adobe 3D Assets to get easy access to ready-to-use assets for my project, and Substance 3D Stager to make the product renders.

Branding from Illustrator to Stager

I love the link between Illustrator and Substance 3D Stager. I created the logo in Illustrator, and I could easily export it to Stager. There, I imported a chocolate bar model and imported my packaging model to which I added a seeded paper material that I found on the Substance 3D Assets library. Very quickly, I could test my logo and see how it would look on my product.

Graphic design from Illustrator to Stager

Adobe Stock sticker Illustrator to Stager

Then, I started working on the concept of the packaging. To create the color palettes, I went to different parks in different cities, mainly Paris, Madrid, and Valencia. The idea was to walk around and take pictures with my phone and see what kind of flowers exist in these specific areas. Then, I used Adobe Capture to extract local color palette variations. So, the story really drives the packaging design.

Color palette with Adobe Capture

Something else I worked on were the patterns on the packaging. I wanted these to match the urban aspect of the product. I wanted to generate an urban map pattern, So I used the Adobe Firefly text to image generator in Adobe Photoshop to create those patterns. This was a very complex pattern so the AI feature in Photoshop really helped me to save a lot of time.

Firefly pattern creation in Photoshop

After working on the branding and packaging design, it was time to go to Substance 3D Stager. I found ready to use materials on the 3D assets website, and I created my own materials from the Adobe Illustrator designs.

3D view in Stager

Stager scene setup

I also used the match image feature in Stager. Once you’ve added your background image, this feature automatically matches the perspective and lighting of that background image, creating a visual consistency between the product and the background. It’s a killer feature and I use it a lot.

Stager scene with default background

The final part of the workflow was to make the different product renders. The challenge here again was how to keep telling the story. So, I made renders of the product, the packaging, but also pack shots with packaging variations to show that there are different and unique chocolate bars flavors.

Studio variations

Then, we have the functional renders, or as we say in design, the use case scenarios. What is very powerful about Substance 3D is that there is plenty of ready to use content, so you can really create multiple scenario renders very quickly. I think that that is very useful, and I will keep using Stager for that.

The power of Substance 3D

With this project, I really enjoyed the speed with which you can create and iterate. This was also my first time using the Substance 3D tools, and I was able to test and bring my vision to life very quickly. This workflow was faster and less complex compared to traditional 3D workflows, but the results are equally high quality. The power of using the Substance 3D tools, Illustrator and generative AI with Firefly is unique, especially if you’re not used to doing 3D design!

The advantage of having a lot of content from Substance 3D Assets that you can use to create scenes quickly while keeping the quality super high is something I also really enjoyed. If you are unfamiliar with 3D, you don't need a lot of knowledge to create a scene that is very interesting.

Environmental lighting is not my specialty. I would rather work on the render and fine tune the materials. In most software tools you must create your own lighting. Well, in Stager it's super easy to set up your lights and your camera angles — the match image feature was perfect to match the lighting with the background image generated with Firefly. The rendering process is very fast, and the interface is super intuitive! I ended up learning a lot about environmental lighting.