Google Pixel Tablet
For the Google Pixel Tablet announcement at Google’s annual keynote, Kühl and Han brought Rocket Lab in for one thing: the surface. The tablet’s signature powder-coated finish had to feel real on screen, and the moment of coating had to look like something you could reach out and touch.
The Material
The whole job was tactility. The brief was focused on how the finish reads before and after coating, the subtle texture, a faint sparkle in the particles, the sense of a real material catching light. We built and lit it to sell exactly that: a surface with weight and grain, not a slick CG render. The kind of detail you feel before you consciously notice it.
The Coating
Then the application itself. We animated the powder drawing onto the surface as a particle system, thousands of fine particles converging and settling into the finished coat, art-directed so the flow felt deliberate but the texture stayed organic. Rocket Lab handled the powder-coating animation and the lighting and rendering, the two things the announcement hung on.
