Cosmic Motors’ Daniel Simon is an internationally acclaimed concept designer and automotive futurist who’s worked with some of the world’s most prestigious automobile makers including Bugatti and Lamborghini. Simon is also the concept vehicle designer behind Disney’s 2010 blockbuster sci-fi flick, “Tron: Legacy,” and lead vehicle designer of Marvel’s highly anticipated 2011 summer release “Captain America.”
In early 2011, Simon added Formula One (F1) racecar designer to his resume, with the world debut of Hispania Racing’s (HRT) F111 car. As HRT enters its second season in the most competitive motorsport on Earth, they reached out to Simon to create strong and iconic livery for their 2011 car.
The first thing Simon tackled was to divide the car graphically into attractive red sponsors areas, and zones of freedom — the latter being distorted shapes where no sponsor sticker works. For the sponsor areas, there are many rules – F1 is one of the most expansive marketing fields in sports. Then, Simon filled the free zone with checkered flags and large racing numbers – “a playful, almost retro-romantic racing approach that I missed in this very serious sport,” claims Simon. The last touch was adding little humorous warning messages to resemble the look of modern aircraft. The reaction from the team and fans, when the F111 car was unveiled was overwhelming.
To turn the massive production CAD data of the F1 car into photo real images overnight for the season premiere, Simon relied on Bunkspeed SHOT Pro 3D rendering software running on NVIDIA Quadro 6000 professional graphics solutions.
“I had less than a day to render the complete press package for the global launch of the HRT F111 – which included 16 images at 5K resolution – there was no room for failure,” continues Simon. “With Bunkspeed SHOT Pro running on NVIDIA Quadro 6000 GPUs I was able to make the impossible happen, and complete the project in roughly 6.5 hours. It would have taken me twice as long if I used a traditional rendering solution running on CPUs.”
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