Interview with Linda Bui
3D Artist at Meta

We sat down with 3D Artist Linda Bui to talk about how she moves between industrial design and visualization—and how the line between the two can sometimes get a little blurry. We asked her what inspired the idea behind Pasta Week and picked her brain on all things 3D, material building, and creative process.

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Tyler:
I was wondering if you could talk about how Pasta Week came about? What inspired the idea, and what inspired your render?

Linda:
About three years ago, I designed a pasta shape for an international competition hosted by Barilla. I had to create images that catered to the Barilla branding as well. It was the first time I rendered anything food-related, and it pushed me to be creative with how to approach material building. It’s easy to make a wood or concrete material—and especially plastic. Often the textures you need are available online. Making something that looks like dry pasta or wet pasta takes a different approach. 

In the kitchen, you mix ingredients for dough. In 3D, you have to think: how do I make this surface look powdery? How do I create those dark flecks you see in dry noodles? How do I randomize that detail for realism? I learned a lot from designing and rendering a plated bowl of pasta. 

This pasta render helped me be more thoughtful about how an image can celebrate a product in a fun way. For the Render Weekly pasta prompt, I wanted to craft a certain art direction, like Michelin culinary plating, to celebrate my very simple pasta shape. The intention is that no expert level of modeling experience is expected for this pasta challenge, but let your imagination be free! 

At my core, I’m still an industrial design–oriented person that’s quite grounded by reality. Despite that, I’m very inspired by the other end of 3D art that’s more abstract and expressive. There’s studios out there that take visualizing products in more experimental directions, like stretching shoes or creating surreal animations that visualize data.

The more I explore my voice in visualization—especially over the past year, and especially in my work at Meta—the more I find myself drawn to expressive kinds of imagery. Creating interior environments, experimenting with photographic effects, trying to bring out a feeling… I’ve come to understand what product rendering can be.

A lot of renders coming from ID folks who’ve moved into viz tend to have heavy similarities. The focus is usually on presenting the product clearly—showing the materials, hinting at the feel of the object, whether it’s soft, hard, smooth, or textured. The backgrounds are clean and not distracting. 

That’s where a lot of people stop. Neutral gradient, a lightly dynamic composition, but still very safe. With the pasta launch images, I thought, what if I pushed past that? What if I made something more expressive?

In my image, I’ve got flour on the floor and floating in the air. I used a brown background—which, surprise, works great. It doesn’t always have to be gray or cool-toned.

Tyler:
You touched on something really interesting—how we see pasta all the time, but then doing this challenge makes you ask, “What even is pasta?” I was holding it up to the light, noticing the subsurface scattering, the flour bunching up in spots. It’s such a familiar material, but when you study it, it fits right into the industrial design material space. It’s molded, textured, kind of rigid.

Linda:
Exactly. And for a lot of people, it’s probably the smallest thing they’ve ever designed. When I modeled mine, I set it to be about 10 millimeters. I’m not sure if I ended up rendering it at that size, but I still had to think about texture and scale for the material and environment. I needed contextual elements to help the pasta actually look tiny. 

Tyler:
You mentioned coming from industrial design into product visualization. What was that transition like for you?

Linda:
I was actually a 2D Art gal up until I went to college, where I discovered Industrial Design and was using software like Solidworks and Keyshot. After college, I worked as an industrial designer for a couple years. Interestingly, I feel like my bosses weren’t enthused about putting a lot of time into crafting renders. 

During COVID, I joined the Minor Details discord server where I met a lot of other passionate industrial designers. Some friends there were doing Render Weekly challenges. I had just come from doing Weekly Design Challenges on Instagram which were for honing my sketching skills. I figured, hey, I wanna give rendering a shot, for fun, and on my own terms!

Renderweekly had a boolean prompt and I modeled a mirror in Fusion360 and rendered it in KeyShot. That was when I realized how much I liked rendering, and eventually learned about what a career path in product visualization was like, from my partner Tim Zarki (who is also a 3D Artist with a design background). 

Fast forward to two years later, I ended up with a portfolio of personal projects that helped me get my first viz job at Logitech. It’s pretty cool that most of my personal projects stemmed from RenderWeekly prompts. The catch is that I didn’t make most of the deadlines… The projects that impressed people the most, were like 2-3 months of work!

Tyler:
I get that. That’s actually why we started Render Weekly—back when we were just trying to improve our sketching. We were doing the Weekly Design Challenge too, and then thought, “Wait, why doesn’t this exist for rendering?”

Linda:
Exactly! Also, I was pretty creatively isolated in real life. None of my friends were really into designing outside of work. I didn’t know anyone who’d meet up with me on a weekend to work on projects just for fun. Being in those online communities made a big difference.

Tyler:
Your friends don’t want to render Boolean forms on a Saturday?

Linda:
I know, right? Hopefully they do now.

Tyler:
Can you talk about how you approach personal projects—what your workflow looks like, what tools you rely on?

Linda:
Sure. I like to model my own stuff—usually in Fusion 360, sometimes Blender. I used Houdini for the pasta launch imagery, too. My main software for creating scenes and rendering is Cinema 4D with Redshift. Moving files from Fusion into C4D can get weird, so I export as STEP and convert it into FBX with Rhino.

Before all that, though, I start with references. I use Savee and Are.na, and then drop everything into PureRef. I love PureRef. Once you learn the key commands, it’s super efficient. You can crop, align things by size, and group stuff easily.

Tyler:
What’s PureRef?

Linda:
It’s a super simple app that lets you drop in images and build moodboards. Kind of like Miro or Figma, but way more lightweight. You can resize it, lock it on your screen, change the background. I even use it as a scale reference.

For example, my Bouquet Lamp was designed to be about six feet tall. I took a screenshot of the longest digital ruler I could fit for my widescreen monitor, dropped it into PureRef, scaled the whole board around it, and locked it to the top. That way I could visually reference scale while working in Fusion.

I usually try to design everything to scale. Even for personal work! That’s just the ID mindset kicking in. Once I’m rendering, I drop the final image into the same PureRef board with my inspiration, just to see if it holds up. If it doesn’t, I revise.

Tyler:
Right now you're at Meta. How does your personal work connect to your professional role?

Linda:
I’m on the industrial design team, and I work on visualizing consumer electronics. The bread and butter of my work is using designers’ CAD and rendering them into hundreds of photorealistic images. 

The output goes to Meta’s site, but also third-party retailers. Each platform has its own image guidelines. Amazon wants white background images as the main visuals. That can be tough if the product is also white, but I’m good at rendering white products on white backgrounds thanks to these headsets. 

The structure of the team also changes things. At Logitech, my vis team was under marketing. At Meta, it's part of industrial design. That impacts priorities, timelines, and even the kind of feedback you get.

When the marketing team owns the timeline, it’s usually “Here’s our notes, can you redo everything by tomorrow?”

Ryan:
Exactly. And half the time it includes geometry changes.

Tyler:
Do you have any advice for students or young designers who want to follow a similar path?

Linda:
If you’re coming from an industrial design background, that’s a huge asset. You probably have some hands-on experience with materials, or at least an understanding of real-world objects. That gives you a better eye. You can tell when a wood texture needs end grain. And yes, lots of 3D artists skip it, but I always notice.

Tyler:
Better watch out for Linda!

Linda:
That’s right! Once you’ve worked professionally, you can start spotting renders in the wild. Especially the office furniture ones. You just know. Although, it helps that I’ve made a lot of office renders for Logitech. 

Tyler:
And now there’s AI to deal with. Are you using it?

Linda:
Not in my workflow. I’ve used ChatGPT, and I am aware of the latest tools, but when it comes to creative work, I really value doing it myself. I like building things from scratch—even my website. I used to Google how to build things like hamburger menus and stitch code together. You can ask AI for that now, which is cool. But I don’t want it to sketch for me, because I can sketch myself.

I think you have to go through the work first. Put in the hours. That’s how you train your eye and your voice. Then maybe later, you’re in a position to train the AI—not the other way around.

Tyler:
Totally. That makes a lot of sense, especially coming from the maker side of ID.

Ryan:
For folks just getting to know you, can you give us a little bio—where you're from, where you studied?

Linda:
I’m Linda Bui. I’m a multidisciplinary designer with a background in industrial design from the University of Illinois at Chicago. These days, I focus on 3D art and product visualization. I’m based in San Francisco. 

Tyler:
Were you born in California?

Linda:
I was born in San Bernardino, and then moved to Chicago with my family. It’s nice to be back. There’s something about the landscape here—it just feels more layered, and I can actually see stars again.

Tyler:
Totally. Having a little topography changes everything. Big skies are nice, but I’ll take some mountains.

Linda:
Yeah, I didn’t realize how much I missed it until I came back.

Ryan:
Well, we’re glad you’re here—and super grateful you took the time to chat with us.

Tyler:
Yeah, seriously. Thanks for sharing your work, your thinking, and your journey. It was really great.

Linda:
Thank you! This was fun.

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To see more of Linda’s work, you can follow the links below.

Instagram
Website

If you’re interested in contributing to this week’s prompt, #rwpasta, submit your render via our submission portal and join the conversation. Whether you're experimenting with flour textures or modeling the tiniest tortellini, we can't wait to see what you come up with.

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