iPhone 17 Pro — ad recreation in Blender

Goal

Recreating an iPhone ad in Blender.

The project started after I watched one of Apple’s latest iPhone commercials. I treated it as a product visualisation exercise — the goal was to recreate the aesthetic of the marketing material as faithfully as possible, using only a 3D model, materials and lighting I built myself in Blender.

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Process

From references to a finished render.

I started by gathering references showing the phone from various angles. The model was built high-poly, with an emphasis on preserving the device’s real proportions and the characteristic rounding of its chassis.

I created the base form using high-vertex-count circles, which allowed me to accurately reproduce the corner shapes. I then merged them into a unified geometry and developed the model through extrusion, loop cuts, and manual detailing of elements like buttons and structural cutouts.

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Challenge

Realistic materials and finish.

The biggest challenge was reproducing the phone’s characteristic titanium finish. To get the material looking right I studied educational resources and visual references, experimenting with shader settings and how the surface reacted to light.

A significant amount of time went into refining subtle reflections and getting the balance right between metal and glass, since it’s the materials that carry the most weight in how the final render reads.

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Result

An exercise that built real craft.

The project helped me significantly develop my hard-surface modelling skills and my approach to working with product materials. Particularly valuable was treating the model as a collection of simple forms that, once properly combined, produce a complex object.

Beyond the render itself, this was above all a process of learning to observe shapes more carefully, analyse references, and make deliberate decisions during modelling.