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.
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.