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» As a freelance visualisation artist, Spencer Livingstone feels pretty positive about the role of AI in his work, as he tells DEVELOP3D’s Emilie Eisenberg
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ondon-based 3D visualisation artist Spencer Livingstone has a passion for bringing designers’ concepts to life in bright colour and vivid detail. In the process, he plays an important role in their overall design workflows. “Many product designers will use KeyShot or another software to render things, but they don’t have enough time to make [the renders] look real. So that’s where I come in,” he explains. “I take prototypes that product designers have made, and I will spend my time visualising them at multiple angles, adding materials and going into lots of depth and detail to make sure that it looks as photorealistic as possible.” 3D rendering and visualisation is expected to be heavily impacted by artificial intelligence (AI) – and Livingstone sees positives and negatives to this trend. Although he was initially concerned by the idea that AI could put him out of a job, subsequently seeing how it might be implemented usefully in the design process has persuaded him that it may provide more good than harm. That said, he feels it may not have developed the necessary maturity to do that yet. “I know that, one day, I will probably be able to take just one picture and AI will be able to do anything with it. But I still think you need someone to input this data. You still need someone like an art director. You’ll need someone to understand how it works, so there’ll always be a place for visualisers like us to be there to input,” he says.
1 Livingstone’s ●
visualisation work at Astro Lighting 2 A prototype design ●
for potential investors
3 A Joseph Joseph ●
design visualised for retail partners
“In the industry we work in, there was at first this idea that maybe everyone’s going to be made redundant. I think it’s come around. There will absolutely need to be people who know how to use that software. And there will absolutely always need to be humans still working alongside it. It’s not going to be something that makes everyone jobless and has factories running itself and designing things and everything like that. It’s not actually that good yet for all of this stuff. So I definitely think the anxiety is a little bit too far in advance for the actual capabilities of AI.”
SET THE STAGE At KeyShot World 2024 in London, Livingstone presented examples of his work, including lamps and light fittings for Astro Lighting, storage solutions for Joseph Joseph, and advertising content for an environmental start-up working on methane reduction solutions. KeyShot, he explained, is integral to his process for its user-friendly interface and quick formatting of detailed mock-ups. After completing his Master’s degree in Information Experience Design at the Royal College of Art, Livingstone worked for Derbyshire-based lighting brand Curiousa, using KeyShot to visualise glass lighting designs created by the brand’s design team. “I concentrated more on visualisation at that point, to which I thought, ‘Okay, is this a career? Should I start to build my visualisation portfolio?’” The answer to that question was clearly, ‘Yes’. Following his role at Curiousa, Livingstone worked at Astro Lighting, a British lighting manufacturer
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