How to brand an animated 3D model

Two kinds of animation, and only one is simple

Rigid animation moves a part as a whole: a door rotates on its hinge, a drawer slides, a lid lifts. The part keeps its shape and changes position. Branding attached to that part travels with it exactly, because the logo and the geometry are moved by the same transform. This covers almost everything in product and vehicle work.

Deforming animation — skinned meshes driven by bones, or morph targets — changes the shape of the surface without moving the part. A character bends; a soft package squashes. Here the surface travels out from under anything attached to the part, so a logo keeps the rest pose while the geometry moves. This is a real limitation, not a setting, and any tool that claims to handle arbitrary deformation perfectly is overstating it.

If you are branding a vehicle, appliance or package, you are almost certainly in the rigid case and none of this will trouble you. The distinction matters for characters and soft goods.

Attach to the part, not to a point in space

The mistake that produces the classic broken result — a logo hanging in mid-air where a door used to be — is branding stored as a position in the world rather than as an attachment to a part. Placing on the moving part itself is what avoids it. If a logo stays still while the part moves, it was placed on the body next to the part rather than on the part.

Attached is not the same as visible

A logo can be correctly attached and still be useless. A door that swings outward carries its branding into view; a door that swings the other way carries it straight into the body, where it is hidden for most of the clip. You cannot tell from the first frame, which is the frame everyone looks at.

Sample the whole clip instead. The useful reading is how much of the animation the logo is actually visible for, and where in the clip it disappears — a figure like “62%” with the frames it is missing from tells you whether to move the logo or leave it.

Export the moment you mean

A render of an animated product has to pick a frame. Left unchosen, that frame is the model at rest — for a van, doors shut, which is rarely the shot anyone wanted. Choose the pose first, then export, and check the result matches what was on screen.