The 3D espresso machine we built for Caffè Iuliano

We started from the product photographs, not from a manufacturer's file: the front, both three-quarter views and a handful of close-ups. Every part of the Frog is modelled on its own in Blender: the split bonnet, the tall tank, the lever, the drip tray and the four switches, built to scale at about 22 × 32 × 40 cm.

The whole model is generated by a script, so any revision can be rebuilt from scratch and compared with the photos from the same fixed cameras. The back and the underside never appear in the photos, so those parts are our best reading of the machine.

A machine this familiar gives itself away in the small parts, so that is where most of the work went. Whenever a closer photo arrived, the model changed with it.

• The lever sits in a teardrop well carved into the shell and ends in a flat, bean-shaped grip.
• The drip tray carries the traced Frog lettering, fine slots and concentric drain rings.
• The spout is a hollow chrome tube with a real bore, so the coffee has somewhere to come from.
• Each switch follows the curve of the shell, checked at 208 points so that none of them floats.
• The ivory is a warm grey matched to the photographs, with the soft gloss of real plastic.

The store is warm and quiet: cream pages, dark type and the machine as the one bright object. It is drawn on a transparent layer, so the page itself becomes the studio floor, lit like a product shoot with soft reflections and a shadow that fades out under the base.

As you scroll, the same machine travels with you: it glides in and pours an espresso, turns to show its parts with notes pinned to them, lines up in three colours and fills a cup up close. The model downloads once and draws on a single canvas. Phones get a larger machine and a turning camera, and visitors who prefer less motion get still images.

For the stills we built a photo studio around the finished model without changing it: six lights on the machine, a seventh on the curved backdrop, 85 mm cameras and Cycles, Blender's path-tracing renderer. Each master is 3000 × 3600 pixels and sharp from front to back.

Ivory, ruby red and piano black share one geometry and differ only in the shell material. That is why the store switches colours without loading a second machine, and why a new angle or colour is a render, not a photo shoot.