A 3D model in Adobe Dimension allows for quick renders with realistic lighting and shadows.
The refined model has every feature from the original bucket, down to the millimeter.
A look at the wireframe in Plasticity - one of my favorite apps, ever!
If You Build It…
For Home Depot’s Spring Black Friday (the biggest campaign of the year) my team was part of a large creative cohort exploring directions for the launch. The assignment was refreshingly open-ended, with a light nudge toward using the iconic Home Depot bucket as a visual anchor. Most of us went off on our own at first, because the primary directive was to come up with unique ideas in the initial stages of the project.
Like everyone else, I started by digging through our asset management system. But the bucket photos were... underwhelming. Same couple of angles. Some had the logo cropped or obscured. All of them had been used in previous creative… and the actual bucket is a slightly different shade from the primary Home Depot orange #F96302.
That’s when I started thinking… “What if I just built the bucket?”
So I did. At first I made a quick prototype using Illustrator’s rotational extrusion, exported as OBJ and brought it into Adobe Dimension. This gave me full control over the angle, lighting, and even typography on the surface. I could test ideas in minutes—rather than hours. With Adobe Dimension, I could render to a PSD file with selection masks and shadows so I could set up the object for photorealistic silhouette treatment.
The early comps received very positive feedback, and I was asked if I could create a broadcast grade 3D asset for animation. So I rebuilt the model in Plasticity for better fidelity, exported it as a high poly mesh, and continued rendering in Dimension. Refined takes had a hyper-real polish—and more importantly, it let me iterate without limitation.
A Related Discovery
Earlier in 2024, our team’s directory in the asset management system was quietly accumulating thousands of files, and none of us knew where they were coming from. The file type was USDZ, but there was no preview. A quick Google search revealed that USDZ files are a lightweight 3D format optimized for Augmented Reality. The App team at Home Depot had been generating these for mobile augmented reality use, but nobody had tried using them in campaign design.
So back in the present, I searched the USDZ we had on hand for models related to this campaign, imported a few into my toolset and… surprisingly, it worked! The best of them rendered beautifully, with clean geometry and lighting. A few were missing textures, but I could salvage the mesh by renaming the .usdz to .zip and pulling the .usd model straight from the package. These models, meant for app-based AR, ended up starring in a series of semi-realistic product compositions that anchored my campaign graphics.
Breakthroughs and Wins
I built several scenes with Home Depot products, and rendered them in a setting with a fill of color for the background. This way the lighting on metallic elements took on the color of the background. The background, being a clean, solid color, was perfect for showcasing the marketing typography. With these compositions being built and managed in Adobe Dimension, the ange and aspect ratio of the scene can be changed to adapt to a variety of publishing dimensions. Other creatives, including leadership, worked with me to develop these and feature their typograpic compositions for the pitches we made to high level creative leads.
I packaged up all the 3D assets I developed and shared them with the rest of the org. I recently found out that the “side quest” bucket made its way into promotional animations that are airing in broadcast spots for Spring Black Friday 2025 this April. In other words, this bucket will be in the final seconds of televised ads for Spring Black Friday 2025!
What started as a workaround became the centerpiece of an entire look. More importantly, it set off a chain of small discoveries—USDZ integration, AR asset reuse, unconventional layout building using 3D renderings for silhouette compositions. This sparked further collaboration and got me pulled into other special projects with leadership.
This was one of the funnest, and most interesting projects out of all my time at Home Depot. I was able to bring together everything I’d learned working within the org, and find new and unique synergies that had not been explored before.
At the end of the day, I’m not interested in just checking the boxes and calling it done. My goal is to come back with ideas no one else thought of, in an efficient manner. I’d rather break something or do something “the wrong way” in the name of invention than get stuck doing safe work that blends into the feed. In this case, the bucket just happened to be the first step towards that goal.
Extra Credit
After the project was complete, I ran a database collection on all USDZ files in our asset managment system. Luckily they were all named after their SKU number, so I was able to use my team’s proprietary scripts to pull relevant information about all of these items so they can be searched by product details, department, brand or SKU number.
Then I created a searchable spreadsheet with details on over 100,000 USDZ files and made it available to anyone in the org via Sharepoint, along with a short guide I prepared to help Associates utilize our 3D assets. Now, anyone can find 3D models of products for use in all kinds of creative work.
Essentially, I created a new creative workflow, then shared how I did it with the entire creative department.
Wrapping up
My principle role at Home Depot is a designer and illustrator for Rich Content. We use data tools and scripts to determine the rank and frequency of product attributes based on what customers want to know about products, and then illustrate those attributes in a semi-realistic style. This allows us to make factual product information more readily available in a format that is easier to understand than a bulleted list of text.
Just like I’ve done with thousands of other pages on the Home Depot site, I generated a set of illustrations and published the rich content in product information section of the product page for the Home Depot Bucket.
