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The role of 3D Visualisation in the Automotive Industry

April 15, 2021

What comes to mind when you think about 3D? In recent years, we have all become more familiar with this term and we have seen it and experienced it in our lives, sometimes even more than we realise. 


We have 3D glasses and 3D Animation that lead to an enhanced cinematic experience or home cinema experience, we have 3D printing that allows people to even print human hearts and of course, we have 3D Visualisation.


But, what does 3D Visualisation entail?


As the name itself suggests, it helps people create better visuals with three dimensions and make everything look a lot more realistic. You might have heard of that same term as 3D rendering or 3D graphics or computer-generated images(CGI). 


In 2019, the 3D Rendering Market size reached 2 USD billion. We also see that the forecast for the industry is looking highly optimistic since the growth estimation is at over 20% CAGR between 2020 and 2026.


3D Rendering has many uses across various industries but the focus of this blog post will be about its trending current applications in the automotive industry.



3D Rendering in the Automotive Industry

When you want to buy a new car and you look at the photos of the model you like, it feels nothing like the live experience. Actually, the difference between the two might actually put you off as a buyer. What 3D rendering is trying to achieve is to create a more realistic experience by producing a wider field of view.


Imagine creating such realistic images that you could almost feel like you are in the car. This could be a great commercial benefit for dealerships that would invest in such technologies because they could convince the end-customer of a car’s benefits without even getting into the car. 


Especially since last year, after Covid-19 struck, people could not really go for a test-drive and struggled when they had to make such an important decision as buying a car. This technology can be a game-changer. 


Many major companies have shut down their physical dealerships completely and are turning to completely virtual and 3D solutions. “The future of Volvo Cars is defined by three pillars: electric, online and growth,” says Lex Kerssemakers, head of global commercial operations “We want to offer our customers peace of mind and a care-free way of having a Volvo, by taking away complexity while getting and driving the car. Simplification and convenience are key to everything we do.”


This is something that 3D Rendering solutions like FovoRender can give to the end customer. An immersive experience that can equalise the physical to the virtual experience with an 180° field of view.


The rising industry competition has pressurized enterprises to adopt 3D models for better visualization of their products, consequently ensuring a competitive edge in the dynamic market.


The challenging part of the rendering when it comes to the automotive industry is how cramped the interior spaces of a car are. This is actually why the 2D images look so flat. To gain more insights into how the 3D Rendering works you can have a look here, at one of FovoRender’s case studies.


When using FovoRender, which is a 3D Rendering technology you get 6 times the volume of space compared to a 2D image. Standard renders produce surprisingly distorted-looking objects even at relatively low fields of view, whereas FovoRender produces a far more natural looking image that gives the true experience of “being there” even when viewing on a standard flat screen at home. 


There is no doubt this is a game-changing technology for the automotive industry that will help the early adopters gain an advantage over their competitors. We have seen it before when the first 3D Visualisation technologies were first introduced. Maybe now is a good time to become part of the action and provide your customers with more immersive experiences of your product.


For any further information on ultra-wide fields of view even up to 180 degrees, contact Fovotec.

Fovotec announce their new 3D rendering technology Dynamic Projection.

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Karim Zouak is an award–winning writer/director/producer that has been in the business for almost 20 years. Working in both Canada and the United Kingdom, he has honed his craft as writer, director, executive/supervising producer, editor and visual effects artist on commercials, television series, feature films and countless online videos for clients like MTV, Channel 4, Nike, Sony, Philips, Virgin, Blackberry, Unilever and Diageo. His work has been produced and seen internationally in multiple languages by millions of regular viewers, and developing strong creative work remains the heart of his dedication to the craft. Karim has been the first film director to try FovoRender for Unreal 4.27.2 in the context of a virtual production. Karim has been testing FovoRender on his fantastic full CGI film project Recognition, due for release at the end of 2022, teaser image below:

David Baylis uses FovoRender to improve realism in automotive visualisation

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David Baylis is a 3D artist living in Vancouver, Canada (Originally from Lille, France). He works as a Technical Marketing Consultant at Epic Games producing demos, tips & tricks tutorials and webinars. As a car enthusiast David specialises in automotive real-time rendering using Epic’s Unreal Engine. He has been working with Fovotec as a development partner and has recently used FovoRender to create a hyper-realistic shot of an Audi A5 that looks closer than ever to real life. "I have been actively testing FovoRender on my scenes, and it's hard to go back to the vanilla version of Unreal! The biggest difference I noticed was for the interior shots. Extremely helpful to use FovoRender to control the distortion effect of the camera. Amazing plug in!" - David Baylis, Technical Marketing Consultant, Epic Games Whilst Epic’s Unreal Engine 4.27 is designed to produce photorealistic results and contains incredible technology, David finds it can be limited in options for 3D image composition. In standard Unreal you can either zoom in for a tight shot with minimal distortion or zoom out for a wide field of view with lots of distortion, which can be restrictive, particularly when rendering the relatively small interior spaces of cars. Here you can see how FovoRender helped David to fine tune the image composition to give the most realistic result. The biggest visual difference is on the interior shot where he could use FovoRender to tweak individual elements of the images such as the curvature of the windshield, and to show a more realistic width of the wing mirrors. What else can you see that has been corrected?

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ThreePointZero creates higher detail ultra-wide angle renders using FovoRender - for high end automotive visualisation. Threepointzero is a software technology company, interacting with companies in the real time computer graphics visualisation industry with offices in London and Brazil. They have recently been working as a development partner with Fovotec on trialling and configuring FovoRender for a high quality automotive project rendering case study. In their line of work, the more details you present on the screen then ultimately the more realistic the result is and that is the challenge they explored with FovoRender. Before partnering with Fovotec, they were using Unreal 4 Normal Cine Camera. In this case, Paul used FovoRender UE4 Path Tracer to fix common distortions created by linear perspective, making the car look even more realistic, both at 120 and 90 degrees FOV. “FovoRender is perfectly suited for rendering wider and higher angle of view stills and it allows us to capture unseen or hard to spot segments of the environment around the car model.” ~Paul Eliasz, Founder The following images show a before / after comparison of the ThreePointZero Mercedes Benz scene rendered in a linear viewport and with an equal field of view using FovoRender.

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Ben Walker is a seasoned professional in the automotive visualisation industry. Having spent several years as Head of Real-Time Imaging at the Burrows agency working for clients such as Ford, McLaren and VW, he set up his own agency CreateCG in 2020, just as the pandemic was beginning to bite. Fortunately business has been brisk since. CreateCG have benefited, like many other agencies, from the general upswing in demand for virtual content in recent times. A few months ago Ben produced some beautiful architectural renders with the Unreal Engine 4.25 version of FovoRender that we showcased on our blog . And so when we got the new path-tracing version working recently we were keen to see how he might use it for high-end automotive visualisation. Automotive visualisation presents some unique challenges for 3D artists, particularly when it comes to interior shots. The spaces are almost always tight, and it’s very difficult to move the virtual camera without cutting into windows, columns or headrests. As a result, the ‘heights and angles’ options for camera position are limited. So creative teams involved in the production of car interiors tend to rely on a few tried and trusted setups that use narrow fields of view or long lenses. These can be great for showing off the details of instruments and trim but less good for capturing the overall feel of the cockpit. We sent Ben a copy of the FovoRender path-tracer running in Unreal 4.27 and let him experiment for a few days. Then we met up and asked him how he got on. One of the things that Ben noticed immediately about applying FovoRender to make shots of a BMW i3 was the freedom it gave him to render more of the car’s interior at once. “Straight away you get a huge sense of space using FovoRender. You can get a lovely shot with lots in the frame that looks great; it’s a much more natural image” A very common setup in autoviz is the view of the steering wheel and dashboard area from the driver’s side. Getting a generous volume of space in a shot like this without deforming the internal structure is a classic problem. In a typical workflow, the artist might start with a linear perspective lens equivalent to a camera lens of around 18 mm, which produces a shot like this:
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