Automotive CGI, exterior and interior
Automotive rendering is an environment problem before it is a car problem: clearcoat, chrome and glass show almost nothing of themselves and almost everything of what surrounds them. We build the world first, then the paint has something true to reflect — for stills, configurator angle sets and film.
A car is a mirror, so the set matters more than the car
Nothing about a car body is locally shaded. Clearcoat is a two-layer material whose highlight is a reflection of a light source, chrome is pure reflection, and glass is reflection plus transmission. Put a perfectly modelled car in an empty environment and it reads as a toy, because there is nothing for any of those surfaces to show. The work is building an environment worth reflecting — the horizon line, the overheads, the ground — and once that exists, the paint looks right almost on its own.
What we deliver for automotive
- Exterior stills — hero angles, three-quarters, profiles, details
- Full paint and wheel ranges from one build
- Interiors: stitching, trim, grain, screens and ambient lighting
- Configurator-grade angle sets, consistent across every option
- Driving and studio film with the same assets as the stills
- Environment builds — studio cyclorama, road, architectural, landscape
- Detail crops for spec pages and press material
Interiors are a different discipline from exteriors
An exterior is a few large, immaculate surfaces. An interior is fifty small ones, all different, all seen from close range: perforated leather, stitched seams, brushed and knurled metal, open-pore timber, woven headliner, soft-touch polymer, and screens that emit rather than reflect. It is modelled to the millimetre because at interior camera distances a millimetre is visible, and it is lit for a space the camera is inside rather than outside.
Configurators and the consistency problem
The point of a configurator is that a customer can compare. That only works if every combination is lit and framed identically — which is achievable by construction in CG and effectively impossible with photography across hundreds of permutations. Build the car and the environment once, and the whole matrix comes off it with no drift between options.
Questions
Do you work from manufacturer CAD?
Yes, and it is the fastest and most accurate route. Automotive CAD is dense and built for engineering rather than rendering, so it needs conversion and cleanup before it shoots well — that is expected and part of the work.
Can you render every paint and wheel option?
Yes. The car is built and lit once, and paint, wheels and trim are variations against that setup — which is what makes a full option matrix feasible at all.
Do you build the environment, or place the car into a photograph?
Both are available and they suit different jobs. A fully built CG environment gives complete control of reflections and lets the same set be reused; a photographic backplate can be faster for a one-off, but every reflection then has to be reconstructed to match a scene that was not built for it.
Can you do interiors as well as exteriors?
Yes. Interiors are modelled to a much finer tolerance because of how close the camera sits — stitching, perforation, grain and screen content are all real geometry and real content rather than textures.
Can the same assets produce film as well as stills?
Yes, and it is the main argument for doing both in one place. The car, the materials and the environment that produced the stills are what the film is shot in, so the campaign holds together instead of drifting between suppliers.