Studio, platform,
VFX house
or agency?

• A specialist product CGI studio

  Commissioned per project or on a retained programme. Small senior team, one creative lead per brief.

  Best when: The visual itself is the point. The product is unreleased, complex or premium, and the imagery has to hold up against the best in the category. You need film, stills and interactive to look like one thing.

  Weak when: A commissioned build needs an agreed handover, including who owns hosting, updates and maintenance. A studio is also the wrong shape for hundreds of routine SKUs to a fixed template.

• A 3D or configurator software platform

  An ongoing licence for software you run. Your developers integrate it, your team loads it with assets.

  Best when: Your website requires a particular platform, and its supported features fit the brief. Confirm who will integrate it, build the product assets and maintain the experience.

  Weak when: The platform renders what you give it. It does not art-direct, it does not decide what the product should look like, and it does not make a mediocre asset look considered. Most brands end up needing someone to build and finish the assets anyway.

• A VFX or post house

  Project-based, often large crews, built around broadcast and cinema delivery.

  Best when: The job is a film first: live action plates, environments, crowd, simulation, effects at broadcast scale, with a product somewhere inside it.

  Weak when: Product work is usually a minor line of business. Product CGI rewards a narrower obsession, with materials, finishes, colourways and macro detail, and that is a different craft from environment and effects work.

• A creative agency

  Retained or per campaign. Owns the idea, the strategy and often the media.

  Best when: You need the campaign thought, the audience work and the channel plan, and you want one partner accountable for all of it.

  Weak when: Most agencies subcontract the CGI. That can work well, and it means the craft decisions sit one step away from you, with a coordination layer in between. Ask who is actually producing the work before you brief.

• An in-house team

  Salaried, permanent, inside your business.

  Best when: Continuous, predictable volume, deep product knowledge, and a need for fast small changes without a briefing cycle.

  Weak when: You hire for average volume and then a launch arrives. Range of craft is limited to who you employed, and one person leaving can take the pipeline with them.

  This is the one model on this list that is not an alternative to the others. An in-house team and a studio do different work in the same picture: the team keeps the routine output, where speed and control matter more than direction, and the studio takes the launch-critical work and builds the accurate asset the team then produces from. Comparing a studio to KeyShot, Unreal or Blender is comparing a supplier to a tool, and concluding you must pick one is how good in-house teams end up carrying a launch they were never resourced for.

• Freelance artists

  Per task or per day, sourced as needed.

  Best when: A defined, self-contained piece of work with a clear specification, or overflow capacity on something already art-directed.

  Weak when: Nobody is accountable for the whole. Consistency across a range, creative direction, technical review and continuity between campaigns all become your job.

• Threekit

  A configurator and product visualisation platform, aimed at brands running variant-heavy catalogues in commerce.

• 3D Cloud by Marxent

  A 3D commerce platform, strongest in furniture and home categories, with room planners alongside product configuration.

• Cylindo

  Product visualisation built around furniture retail, serving variant imagery and 360 spins to product pages.

• Emersya

  An interactive 3D and AR experience platform, used where the interaction itself is the point rather than a listing image.

• Vectary

  A browser-based 3D and AR tool, lighter weight, often reached for when a team wants to publish something quickly without a pipeline.

• Matterport

  Spatial capture. It digitises spaces rather than products, so it answers a different question from the rest of this list.

The counterpart matters as much as the list: every one of these displays assets that somebody still has to build, finish and keep accurate. Licensing a platform does not produce the 3D, and a platform fed mediocre assets looks exactly as good as the assets. XO3D has no partnership, reseller or accreditation relationship with any of them, and names them here so you can decide, not because we sell them. Where the layers sit relative to each other is set out on integrations.