Will GenAI Usher in a New Era of Maximalism?
Forget White Backgrounds… Let’s Get Weird
Let’s talk about generative AI…but not the usual debate about whether it’s going to take all our jobs or usher in a golden age of no work and universal basic income and free time and emotional support robots. That conversation is loud enough already.
Instead, I want to look at something I don’t hear many people talking about:
What if generative AI doesn’t just change how we work but also how things look?
Because I think we’re standing at the edge of a huge visual shift.
And it’s got everything to do with maximalism.
The Minimalist Era of 3D
For the last two decades, 3D has been all about keeping things simple.
Not necessarily because minimalism is better, but because it was achievable.
I spent years providing thesis advising at the School of Visual Art (SVA) in NYC. Every first meeting of the semester I would ask the students to present their storyboards and ideas for their thesis projects. I would inevitably get these complex stories with multiple environments and crowds and fur and fx simulations and I would always….and I mean always….have to tone them back.
Every extra asset meant more modeling, more rigging, more lighting, more rendering time. And for most people, that was just too much to get through to produce professional level work for an animated short and eventually to build out their portfolios.
Same deal in production. You think Toy Story was set in a kid’s bedroom because it was narratively genius? Maybe it was but it was also a smart solution to a technical problem. “We can’t do fur or realistic humans…they always just look plastic.” “No problem! Let’s just make a movie about plastic toys and only show humas from the knee down!?!?”
That wasn’t a style choice. That was a technical workaround.
So we got used to keeping things tight.
We convinced ourselves white backgrounds were elegant.
That product shots floating in space were “clean.”
That desaturated was professional.
And now, every site, every campaign, every pitch deck kinda looks the same.
GenAI = Maximalism Unlocked
Then generative AI walked in and broke the rules.
Now you can build a photorealistic environment around your product without hiring a crew or building geometry from scratch. You can fill the screen with patterns, color, clutter, texture—whatever you want—and get that shot out by Friday. All with more repeatable procedures so you could get similar output time and time again for campaign ads.
You want to render your sneaker on a rooftop in Tokyo at sunset with glowing koi swimming around it and a cherry blossom storm in the background? Cool.
And that background didn’t need to be modeled, shaded, and optimized for Unreal. It’s just there to support your hero asset.
Suddenly, the old limitations of 3D (time, budget, limited expertise, team size) don’t hold as much power.
And when the constraints go away, so does the excuse to keep it boring.
Maximalism Isn’t Just a Vibe—It’s a Strategy
And this isn’t just me rambling about art direction. Look around:
Fashion designers are going off. Bach Mai used Midjourney to generate flamingo-infused Palm Beach print patterns for their entire Fall collection. Monse used AI to generate creepy floral fabrics with eyeballs hidden inside. Eyeballs! In the flowers!
Marketing teams are leaning hard into hyper-surreal AI visuals. Remember that Barbie promo floating around with her standing in front of the Burj Khalifa like some dreamlogic fever ad? That’s what modern campaign art looks like now.
Coca-Cola’s “Create Real Magic” campaign straight up invited fans to generate psychedelic digital Coke ads using AI and then plastered them across social. It was maximalism-as-community-collab.
Pepsi’s rebrand? Bright, loud, 80s-infused color palette. It’s the opposite of clean and flat—and not a coincidence.
Collina Strada’s runway show used AI not just for prints, but for the whole vibe—set design, styling, even concept imagery. It was chaotic, colorful, overloaded—in a good way.
And in branding, I’ve seen agencies generating full-on brand mascots, graphic patterns, even AI-based “brand atmospheres” to move past just a logo and wordmark.
Why? Because clean and minimal doesn’t grab attention anymore.
Maximalism does. Complexity does. Weirdness does. Surprise does.
That means if you're a 3D artist trying to break through—whether you’re freelancing, job hunting, pitching a new service, or just building portfolio work—there’s real value in showing you can push beyond the white-box render.
What It Looks Like in 3D Workflows
Here’s where it gets interesting.
The workflows I’ve seen work best combine traditional 3D (the thing you need to nail perfectly) with generative tools that build the world around it.
Start with a product render—something you modeled in Blender, CLO, ZBrush, whatever.
Drop it into a comp where the background is AI-generated.
Stylize it. Layer it. Make ten versions.
Use gen AI to test color schemes, lighting setups, even thematic concepts before you go deep on building the full scene.
Suddenly your visuals don’t just look “better”….they feel like something.
You can explore art direction again, instead of just surviving the pipeline.
Even in animation and motion design, AI is already making it easier to generate surreal loops, intricate textures, and compositing elements that would’ve taken forever to create by hand.
This Isn’t About Replacing Anything
To be clear: this isn’t about making everything with AI.
It’s about using it to get back some of the ambition we’ve had to cut out over the years.
Maximalism didn’t disappear because we stopped liking it.
It disappeared because it was too damn expensive to do well.
But now? That bar just got lowered.
So let’s stop pretending white-on-white-on-white is the only “professional” way to present 3D work.
Let’s use the tools we have to get weird again.
Final Thought
If I lost my job tomorrow, I wouldn’t be putting together another minimalist product showcase.
I’d be building a portfolio that proves I can create maximalist brand systems. It would have dynamic, scalable visuals that give companies something new.
Because if AI is going to help us make more stuff, let’s at least make sure that stuff is loud, colorful, and impossible to ignore.
And if I’m wrong and the future really is a jobless, GenAI-powered utopia where we all dress like Zardoz Sean Connery… well, that still sounds more fun than another endless white background comp.
3D Merch is here and we have a new hoodie!
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Link to Google Doc With A TON of Jobs in Animation (not operated by me)
Hello! Michael Tanzillo here. I am the Head of Technical Artists with the Substance 3D team at Adobe. Previously, I was a Senior Artist on animated films at Blue Sky Studios/Disney with credits including three Ice Age movies, two Rios, Peanuts, Ferdinand, Spies in Disguise, and Epic.
In addition to his work as an artist, I am the Co-Author of the book Lighting for Animation: The Visual Art of Storytelling and the Co-Founder of The Academy of Animated Art, an online school that has helped hundreds of artists around the world begin careers in Animation, Visual Effects, and Digital Imaging. I also created The 3D Artist Community on Skool and this newsletter.
www.michaeltanzillo.com
Free 3D Tutorials on the Michael Tanzillo YouTube Channel
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Reminds me of the Baroque period, art and architecture, and its response to the elegant and restrained classical style of the renaissance. This new age of loud, maximalist, high drama, and psycho-pop visuals in AI feels like a natural swing in the pendulum, away from sleek modernism and Japandi/Scandi harmony.