CRUX4D

YSL Jewelry

Metal grain, polish falloff and hard specular edges — jewellery rendered close enough to read the tooling.

Client
Yves Saint Laurent
Sector
Jewellery
Year
2025
Scope
Research & Design, Art Direction, Look Development

About the project

Jewellery fails in CGI when metal reads as plastic. The whole project was organised around avoiding that: a physical reference shoot first, then a shader library built to match measured roughness values rather than eyeballed ones.

Camera work stays macro and deliberate. Movement is slow enough that the specular highlight travels across the surface as a single continuous event, which is what sells weight to the eye.

Delivered as a coordinated set — hero film, vertical cutdowns, and a library of looping stills for retail screens.

YSL jewellery CGI frame — macro metal surface with travelling specular highlight
YSL jewellery CGI frame — polished edge detail against dark ground
YSL jewellery campaign still — wide composition with layered depth of field
YSL jewellery look development plate — ultra-wide format

Credits

Mads HtoonCreative Director

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