Automotive Animation: AVID Mini Case Study 2

48V Mild Hybrid System for Heavy Vehicles

You will see in this automotive animation video that we have included quite a bit of live-action video we filmed of AVID’s innovative demonstrator vehicle. AVID had taken the truck for testing down at Bruntingthorpe Proving Ground near Leicester so a TL Multimedia team travelled down for the day to get as much interesting footage as we could. All-in-all the shoot used 3 cameras (including a Go-Pro fixed on the side of the truck). The Proving Ground is also an air-field so all kinds of jet engines as well as racing vehicles were rumbling all around us. No matter how sturdy your tripod is – if the ground is shaking then your shot is going to wobble! (Indeed, we have since invested in a couple of gimbals.) Thankfully Ryan recorded the voice-over in our studio audio booth in Newcastle so we didn’t have to contend so much with the epic noises of the race-track/air-field. But enough about the filming… on to the CAD animation.

Putting Automotive Animation Together.

While there are numerous similarities between a bus and a typical truck the bits of the power-train are all in different places. AVID’s mild-hybrid system is designed to comprehensively electrify as much of this as possible. So the CAD elements we wanted to show were on both sides of the truck and under the driving cab. As you can see there’s a similar eFan system and engine but they are at the front this time. We had to ‘turntable’ the whole vehicle around a bit more than we did for the bus video. This was because of the locations of the other ancillary systems and the hefty battery pack on the opposite side of the truck. CAD models are pretty heavy duty on the polygon count and we try to preserve as much detail as we can for accuracy. The complexity of the various CAD parts going together in one scene caused quite a few crashes on our workstations in Autodesk Maya. Much rebooting and very paranoid regular saving was required to make sure we didn’t keep losing work.

Rendering Changes.

In the bus video we had used our “small” MentalRay render-farm (Then 70 odd CPU cores and some 300GB of system RAM) to render the animation out. This took a very long time so we were looking for a more efficient way to carry out renders to speed up the production process. So we tried out some GPU based rendering methods and found they worked reasonably well on our Quadro GPUs from a single machine. Having a faster render-pipeline also let us quickly fade in and out elements to reveal the inside/underneath. So we have continued to use this render method in CAD animations since.

Hire TL Multimedia for Automotive Animation

If you are interested in connecting with us and hiring us to produce an automotive animation for your business then contact us here: tlmultimedia.co.uk/contact/