BSPK R&D

Material Study in 3 parts

A study in beauty's usual materials — splash, smear, sand — pushed into unexpected territory to find new looks beyond the category's usual polish.

01 · SPLASH

Arriving From Thin Air

The splash isn't a liquid effect layered onto the bottle. It's the mechanic that reveals it, timed so the product arrives out of motion instead of just sitting in frame. The hard part was starting from nothing: no pool, no surface, no existing liquid to react against, simulated entirely in Houdini until the interaction felt inevitable rather than assembled.

What it proved: we can time a fluid simulation to a precise narrative beat, not just render convincing liquid, which is exactly what a hero product shot needs, an entrance, not just a splash.

02 · SMEAR

Starting From a Photograph

The set started as an actual photograph, including the printed test sheet it was shot against, then was rebuilt entirely in 3D, with the flowers generated using AI, a mixed-media process chosen specifically so the material wouldn't read as typical, synthetic-looking CG.

The material was designed to sit deliberately between skincare and makeup. In the grade, we pushed the palette toward pink and nude, closer to a lip gloss or a skin serum, keeping the formula unresolved while making sure it still read unmistakably as cosmetic. The pull reads as if it were dragged by a thumb or a palette knife, but there's no real touch behind it and that same translucency doubles as a functional device, letting graphics underneath show through the smear rather than sit as surface texture alone.

03 · Sand

Both Particle and Liquid

The sand was built to behave as two materials at once: dry particle, and wet clumping liquid, with breakage, settling and drag, all calibrated to that in-between state, closer to wet sand collapsing under its own weight than sand pouring freely. Simulated in Houdini, built specifically for this kind of hybrid particle-and-fluid behavior. We ran repeated, crossing passes into the same surface, each disruption folding into the last so no single moment reads as the shot's origin or endpoint. We can hold a material in a genuinely in-between physical state through repeated disruption, not just one clean simulation pass.