Building nanea: 33 Designs, 1,692 Renders and a Configurator That Never Shows a Placeholder

On nanea.am a client configures engagement rings, wedding bands and bracelets piece by piece. Most online configurators cheat in one of two ways. Either they photograph a handful of hero pieces and recolour them for the other metals, or they show a beautiful image for the default combination and a flat diagram for everything else. Both are visible to a buyer within a few clicks, and both quietly tell them that the ring they are configuring has never actually been made.

nanea wanted the opposite: whatever the client picks, the photograph should be of that ring. Yellow, white or rose gold. Oval, pear, emerald, marquise, princess, cushion — whichever cuts the design offers. Three-quarter, front, side and top. It is a demanding brief, and it turns a jewelry collection into a production job: hundreds of images that must all look as if they came from one studio on one afternoon.

The launch collection, in numbers:

• CAD models for every design and every centre cut it is offered in — a pear is a different seat, not a resized oval.
• A render for every combination of metal, cut and angle the site can show, named so the site can find it without a lookup table.
• One lighting and camera setup for the whole collection, so a band and a bracelet sit side by side on the page without looking like they came from different shoots.

Twelve engagement rings, from a plain four-claw solitaire to pavé halos and hidden-halo settings that only reveal themselves from the side. Each was modelled once per centre cut and rendered in all three golds.

The quickest way to fake a cut selector is to take one model and scale the stone. It fails immediately: a pear needs its point protected, an emerald needs corner claws, a marquise needs both tips covered, a princess has corners that chip. Each cut changes the seat, the claw positions and sometimes the gallery underneath.

So every cut is its own model. The camera does not move between them, which is what lets the site cross-fade from one stone to the next with the band holding perfectly still — the setting is identical, only the stone and its seat change. Pure Line, the collection's plain solitaire, shows it best:

Metal is the one choice that is genuinely a rendering problem rather than a modelling one: the same geometry, three materials. The difficulty is consistency. Yellow gold that looks warm next to a rose gold that looks orange, or a white gold that reads as grey steel, makes a collection look cheap even when each image is fine on its own. The three materials were tuned against each other once and then locked for every design in the collection.

A buyer looks at a ring from four directions before they trust it, and each angle answers something the others cannot. The three-quarter sells it. The front shows how the head rises from the band. The side shows how high the stone sits — which decides whether it catches on sleeves — and reveals hidden halos and galleries. The top proves the stone shape and the claw layout. Twin Rope, two twisted ropes with a row of gold beads between them, shows why all four matter:

Eighteen bands, from fine plain ropes and hammered textures to full eternities. Bands are deceptively hard to render well: there is no centre stone to carry the image, so the metal finish and the rhythm of the setting have to do all the work — an engraved floral pattern, a herringbone relief or a row of heart-shaped stones has to read clearly at thumbnail size on a phone.

Three bracelets complete the launch: a classic tennis bracelet, a tennis bracelet with every stone in its own bezel, and a hinged pavé bangle. A tennis bracelet is dozens of identical settings in a chain, which is exactly where a render gives itself away — repeated stones that sparkle identically look artificial. The light, the metal and the stones were set up so the chain reads as a piece of jewellery rather than a repeated pattern.

The images are what people see, but the parts that made the project work were dull and systematic:

• One camera per angle for the whole collection. Rings of different heights were framed to the same rules, so a grid of thumbnails reads as one catalogue rather than thirty-three separate shoots.
• Identical cameras across cuts within a design, so switching the stone on the site is a cross-fade, not a jump.
• A strict file-naming scheme — design, cut, metal, angle — so the website maps a client's choice straight to the right image. No spreadsheet in between, nothing to fall out of date.
• Every combination rendered, not just the popular ones. A configurator is judged by its least likely option: the moment one choice shows a placeholder, the buyer stops trusting the other images too.

It was a pleasure to build this collection with the nanea team. They had a clear idea of the brand they wanted — honest pricing on the page, every option shown as it really is, and pieces made to order in Yerevan — and they held the work to it down to the last cut of the last band.

We wish nanea every success with the launch and many happy couples. You can see the full collection, and configure any of these pieces yourself, at nanea.am.