Smiling Wolf created the new brand for Union Brew, a coffee shop at Liverpool John Moores University. We were commissioned in 2019 to bring the brand to life in CGI before the physical space existed.

What we did.

Photoreal CGI brand elements and environment stills for client visualisation.

This is work we do regularly for design studios — building the world around a new brand before it's in the world. A logo, a colour palette and a few mockups can only carry a client so far. Seeing the brand applied across an actual café — exterior signage in daylight, interior fit-out, finishes, lighting, even the people who'll use the space — closes the gap between concept and decision. It lets the client sign off with confidence and gives the design team a far more persuasive story to tell.

For Union Brew, that meant building the café from the ground up in CGI: exterior with street furniture and signage, interior with seating, retail displays, lighting and material treatments, populated with CG characters to give a sense of scale and life. Everything in the frame is computer-generated. The aim was photoreal enough that the renders read as photography of a real place, not visualisations of a proposed one.

Built in Cinema 4D and rendered in Arnold.