Industrial Animation: AVID Mini Case Study 4
The AVID EVAD Electric Vehicle Powertrain Demonstrator
After TL Multimedia produced the EVO Electric Motor industrial animation video, AVID wanted to put together a more comprehensive power-train video to showcase their electric vehicle demonstrator: the AVID EVAD. The purpose of this vehicle is to provide AVID’s clients with the ability to test and prototype custom solutions for various use-case scenarios. TL Multimedia’s power train animation reveals what goes on under the hood of this electric car.
Revealing the intricacy of the design with Industrial Animation
One of the problems with a demonstration product like a this small car is that, on the surface, it isn’t even obvious that the vehicle is electric. This is why AVID has emblazoned a livery which says so in big bright lettering. But even if you look under the hood it isn’t easy to see what is going on. This is common with most complex machinery but in the EVAD, as in most EVs, a large amount of the power-train such as batteries and convertors, is actually under the passenger space. This is why exposing the 3D CAD which composes the whole system is useful. By importing the various component CAD parts we were able to separate each part out of the car and highlight it for explanation.
The EVAD uses an off-the-shelf body plan of an older model combustion engine car so we were able to use a similar off-the-shelf 3D library model for the CG Animated car body itself. We ‘faded’ this body away to reveal the layout and composition of the various parts where they are placed inside the body and chassis.
A desirable street environment for a car
As you can see we also used some video footage we took of Ryan driving the car around. So when we switch from video to the CAD version we wanted to have some kind of street surrounding the car. We could have aimed for something super realistic but this would have posed two issues: 1) it would take a long time to prepare this for rendering as well as the rendering itself and 2) The purpose of the animation is not to show off the environment but the vehicle. So we put together an environment based on some typical British street props which TL Multimedia previously sold on the Unity Asset store. It isn’t super realistic but it provides sufficient context to showcase the 3D model of the car until we remove the outer shell. This had the additional advantage of being something TL Multimedia owned and so didn’t need to spend the budget making from scratch.
Optimisation and Compositing challenges
This project was by far the most complex industrial animation TL Multimedia had completed for AVID at this point. Aside from the density of polygons due to each component being largely the full detailed CAD there is also the complexity in highlighting each object so it ‘pops out’ in a moving scene. We could have spent some time decimating and reducing the detail of CAD model elements for various purposes, including making proxy objects to lighten the load while animating. However adding in tasks to save a bit of time can be false-economy on a project like this because the ‘saved’ time can be lost to the optimisation stage. What we did to help instead was use separation layers in 3D to allow us to show and hide the different parts while working and also to render each part out separately. This meant we needed to re-assemble the scene from a stream of rendered sequences and layer them all together in compositing software. The end result of those layers allowed us to time the change-outs in post and also blur/fade out the background to leave high-lighted components totally visible.
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