Client
Confidential, per NDA
Files received
Direct engineering export
Deliverables
5 distinct environments
Timeline
Brief to final delivery
Pipeline
Tools as London/NYC
The client makes DC fast chargers and AC charging units — from slim wall-style posts to high-power dispensers built for electric semi-trucks. What they didn’t have was a single usable marketing image.
What we received: a folder of STEP files exported straight from their engineering department, and a general brief that amounted to “show our chargers installed in real-world locations, across the markets we sell into.” That’s it. No reference photography, no site plans.
This is more common than people outside the industry assume. Engineering CAD is built for machining tolerances, not storytelling. The STEP files contained thousands of internal parts — fasteners, PCBs, cable glands — that would never appear in any photo, and precisely zero information about where this product lives in the world.
That gap — between “we have the 3D data” and “we have an image” — was the project.
⸺ 02 · Concept development
When a client brings no creative direction, the studio has to become the art director, the site planner and the marketing strategist before it can be the rendering team. Making a charger look shiny is the easy 30%. Deciding which charger goes in which environment, at what scale, telling what story — that’s the 70% that determines whether the images actually sell hardware. For every scene, we had to answer four questions.
/ 01
The client sells to fleet operators, fuel retailers, big-box stores, and highway charging developers. Each buyer needs to see their own site in the image — one scene per segment, mapped before touching any software.
/ 02
A megawatt-class dispenser with overhead cable management looks absurd next to a hatchback; a compact dual-port unit disappears next to a semi. Matching product to environment is a strategic call, made by studying how real networks deploy comparable hardware.
/ 03
Cabinets behind dispensers, not beside them. Bollards protecting equipment from turning trucks. Cables that plausibly reach vehicle inlets. Invisible when correct, instantly fatal to credibility when wrong.
/ 04
A semi charging mid-route. A van fleet plugged in overnight. A driver charging while shopping. If a viewer can’t read the story instantly, the image is decoration, not marketing.
We presented all of this as previsualization layouts — rough scene compositions with camera angles — before final production. The client approved the concepts first, so nobody paid for a beautiful render of the wrong idea.
⸺ 02 · Capabilities · Five disciplines
Each environment was designed for a specific buyer, and each one is a fully built 3D scene — architecture, vehicles, signage, sky — not a photo composite..
/01
Electric semi-trucks charging under a green-accented canopy with a city skyline behind — built to show megawatt hardware at true scale next to Class 8 trucks, a question photography can’t answer for installations that don’t exist yet.
/02
A behind-the-warehouse charging yard: numbered bays, power cabinets, bollards, trucks at loading docks — laid out the way an actual depot electrification project would be.
/03
Cinematic 3D walkthroughs and aerial flythroughs that reveal a project in motion — scored, graded and cut for sales suites, investor presentations and social. When stills aren’t enough to sell the space.
/04
An EV recharge zone integrated alongside conventional pumps — answering fuel retailers’ exact question: how does this fit my existing forecourt footprint?
/04
Destination charging outside a big-box store — dual-cable DC units on a curbed island, marked EV bays, a sedan mid-charge. The “charge while you shop” pitch.
/04
The full charger family on a dark reflective floor with active screens — one clean image that anchors product pages and lets buyers compare form factors at a glance.
⸺ 04 · From STEP file to photoreal
Raw engineering CAD is render-hostile: import it untreated and you get either week-long render times or plasticky results. Most first-time clients don’t budget for model preparation because no one told them it exists.
01
Strip the STEP files of internal components, re-topologize surfaces for rendering, add the tiny imperfections — edge bevels, panel gaps — that make hard-surface products read as manufactured objects, not mathematical solids.
02
Physically based materials from brand guidelines: powder-coated housings, glass touchscreens, rubberized cables. We also design on-screen UI for every display — a powered-off charger in a marketing image reads as a broken charger.
03
Every scene gets its own lighting logic — crisp morning light at the depot, warm late afternoon in the retail lot, bright coastal daylight at the truck plaza. Same Corona/V-Ray/Blender pipeline as any London or New York studio.
04
Color grading, atmospheric depth and lens characteristics matched across all six frames so the set feels like one photographer shot the whole campaign.
A blueprint, a plot photo, or a napkin sketch is all we need. See a recent Auburn Partners project transform from site photo to final render.
From CAD to photoreal. Drag the handle to see how Rapid Renders turns a flat massing model into a photorealistic render — context, lighting and materials, all built from your 2D inputs.
For EV infrastructure marketing, 3D rendering isn’t the budget option — it’s the only option that works.
Most of the installations this client needs to show don’t exist yet. You cannot photograph a truck charging plaza that hasn’t been built, and even for live sites you can’t control the weather, close the forecourt, or remove a competitor’s branded vehicle from the frame.
There’s also a compounding asset argument photography can’t match. The client now owns production-ready 3D models of their entire product family. New SKU — drop it into any existing scene. New market — new environment, same products. Seasonal campaign, night shots, animation — all fractions of the original cost, because the foundation exists.
We covered the same effect in our 29-SKU consumer goods project, where one round of modeling produced 145 final renders.
Don’t see yours? Drop us a line — most questions get a personal response within two hours during studio hours
CAD-based charger renders typically cost $250–$700 per image at our studio, with complex environment scenes reaching $1,500+. Multi-scene packages get volume discounts — 10% above 10 images, 15% above 25. Every quote is fixed-fee with up to 5 revision rounds included.
STEP files alone are enough — that’s all this client sent. We also work natively with SolidWorks exports, Rhino, AutoCAD, 3ds Max and Blender files. No materials, textures or concept work needed from your side.
This six-scene project ran about three weeks from brief to final delivery. A single CAD-based product render takes 2–5 days. Rush delivery is available at a 40% surcharge when a launch date is close.
Yes — and it’s the most valuable thing we do. For this project the entire creative direction (environments, charger placement, vehicle stories, even a fictional fleet brand) came from our side, approved by the client at previz stage before production began.
No. We design fictional liveries and neutral vehicles so your marketing images carry zero trademark risk — a detail most clients don’t think about until their legal team does.
Yes — because they’re built from your actual CAD geometry, dimensions and proportions are exact by definition. We add real installation logic (cabinet placement, bollards, cable reach, bay geometry) so infrastructure buyers don’t spot anything false..
That’s the point. Your product models become a permanent asset library — new scenes, new angles, animations and future SKU variants all build on it at a fraction of first-project cost.
Usually with a concept suggestion you can react to. No packages, no calls, no commitment.
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