Who doesn't long to arrive at a beautiful and lonely place, to sit in front of the camping van in the evening sun? Everything is bathed in reddish light. The view sweeps over the rugged coastline and moving sea...
OK - sorry - wake up! No time to dream. Let's talk about technology.
This project aimed to explore the extent to which the technical capabilities of the Unreal engine are sufficient to replace real photos in marketing campaigns with 3D real-time, realistic representations. In addition to the visual quality achieved, savings in time and effort compared to a photo campaign at a very remote place are key evaluation criteria.
The larger area was initially captured using aerial imagery and processed with photogrammetry. Based on the resulting 3D data and the required image resolution, the vehicle and cameras were positioned, defining the close-up area to be manually refined for greater detail.
Within this close-up area, an Unreal Landscape was created using height data from the photogrammetry and textured with cliff assets available in Quixel Megascans. Vegetation and landscape materials were also sourced from the Quixel library.
The immediate ground around the vehicle was covered with 3D stone rubble to provide sufficient detail for close-up shots. Photo references were used to research and select appropriate content. The materials for all assets were adjusted to ensure visual harmony in terms of albedo, normal, and specular properties. The water was modeled as circular geometry and its material was created using the EPIC Water Planes Shader. The surf was represented by a plane geometry running along the shoreline, covered with a material featuring repetitive, alpha-masked foam effects.
The access road was constructed as a spline-following plane geometry, textured with a repeating "dirt road" material. The distant area was built using optimized photogrammetric 3D data, textured with color-adjusted albedo maps derived from the photogrammetry to match the overall scene. The sky was created using a SkyDome and an HDRI texture from polyhaven.com, chosen to suit the scene. An ExponentialHeightFog was applied to create smooth transitions between the distant area geometry, the water surface, and the SkyDome.
The environment lights are divided into three lighting channels. Channels 0 and 1 are reserved for the vehicle, and channel 2 is exclusively for the environment. This makes it possible to use a directional light exclusively for the environment.
Six lights are used exclusively for the vehicle. This prevents unwanted light spots on the ground if you want to brighten up the wheels.
To use as little performance as possible, only one spotlight for the vehicle and the directional light has cast shadow activated. CastShadow, combined with foliage, means many areas with materials that use alpha shadows are decisive performance factors.
The vehicle is additionally illuminated with camera-specific light sources, which are only set to visible when the respective cam is activated. This makes it possible to use different lights for the exterior and interior.
Check out Volkswagen's website for more information. The project is a joint work together with the AVP Volkswagen Content team. Thank you, ABI & MedienFabrik, for the great collaboration!
Kommentare