Mercedes-Benz

Technical Animation

As part of the presentation for the Mercedes-Benz eCitaro, the customer wanted an animation that explained its technical functions in detail.

They provided us with all the necessary geometry, but of course they could not judge how much of it we really needed to display its functions in a simplified and appealing way, so we were sent a lot more geometry than we needed and had to meticulously clean it out and organise it in a way that we could configure it for the different scenes.

Next was materialisation. None of our projects necessitated that anything can go holographic, glow, or animate in any way, so our materials had to be expanded upon. I gave the entire bus an override that made it holographic, created functions that allowed each technical part to glow in a custom colour (controlled through parameters by the Unreal sequencer) and created new holographic materials to show power flow. A simple set of smoke vfx communicated temperature changes.

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Finally, I scripted the sequence, rendered it out, and edited the final film in Premiere. Only the transitions and the text overlays are done in post, which allowed for easier language changes.