CGI Ad
A CGI ad is an advertisement built with computer-generated imagery — the product or scene is rendered in 3D rather than filmed — used to show a product in ways that would be impossible or too expensive to shoot. The recent viral wave of hyper-real, oversized products staged in real cities is CGI advertising.
What is a CGI ad?
A CGI ad is an advertisement built with computer-generated imagery — the product, or the whole scene, is rendered in 3D rather than filmed with a camera. It lets a brand show a product in a setting that would be impossible, dangerous, or too expensive to shoot: a perfume bottle the size of a building, a drink pouring in zero gravity, a car driving through a cross-section of itself. The recent viral wave — giant products staged hyper-realistically in real streets ("faux out-of-home") — is CGI advertising.
How CGI ads are made
The traditional route is a 3D/CGI studio: artists model the product, build the environment, light it, and render photoreal footage. It's powerful but slow and expensive — $2,000–$10,000+ and days to weeks. The newer route is AI: an AI motion-graphics tool takes a product photo and a text brief and generates a cinematic, CGI-style clip in minutes, with no 3D modeling.
iArt takes the AI route — upload a product photo, describe the look, and it films a cinematic ad conditioned on your real product for about $0.80. See our hands-on test and the cinematic product video maker. For how it compares with six other tools on the same photo, see our tested comparison of AI product video generators.
CGI ad vs. filmed ad
A filmed ad captures a real product with a real camera; a CGI ad renders it, so anything is possible — impossible camera moves, surreal scale, flawless surfaces — at the cost of 3D production. AI-generated cinematic product videos sit in between: the CGI look and camera freedom, generated from a single photo, without the studio or the render farm.
Related concepts
Related: cinematic product video, product video from a photo, motion graphics.