Why BMW, Ferrari and other automakers are turning to game engines.
The automotive industry is evolving. Electric vehicles are charging up, autonomous vehicles seem inevitable, and consumers have changing expectations of what a car should be. Amidst it all, the industry is shifting into D—for Digital.
“Over the course of the last several years we’ve seen a huge digital shift to the automotive industry,” explains Rory Carroll, editor-in-chief of automotive news site Jalopnik. “Right now, we’re… seeing this concept of a car’s digital IP.”
Carroll was hosting an automotive-focused episode of The Pulse, a video series from Epic Games, developer of the real-time 3D platform Unreal Engine. The series explores how real-time 3D technology is spreading out from its original domain—video games—and impacting industries such as automotive.
How Can Real-Time 3D Help the Automotive Industry?
The shift to digital in the automotive industry is affecting the entire process of vehicle development, from design to marketing.
For decades, vehicle designers have used a seemingly quaint approach to model their designs: clay. Technically, it’s not real clay, but a proprietary blend of waxes and filler known as industrial plasticine. Whatever you want to call it, automotive designers pack and scrape and shape the substance into a full-size mock-up of their vehicle.
Real-time 3D platforms are like a better version of clay, according to Carroll. They provide visualization capabilities such as virtual reality (VR), which offers designers a dynamic new way to evaluate design options. Automotive companies such as BMW have already begun embracing VR for design, with one Pulse panelist suggesting VR has helped the company visualize new features of its future cars.
Doug Wolff, an automotive business development manager at Epic Games, thinks platforms like Unreal Engine can go even further than being a digital version of clay.
“You could try new things out in VR without having to worry about whether or not the hardware even exists,” he said. “Like, ‘Oh, would it be cool if when I touch the door handle, the door disappeared.’ Instead of having the engineers go and figure out how to do that, you can show the content and see if anybody likes it before you go and build the hardware.”
The digital nature of real-time 3D platforms also enhances the ability to iterate on designs and try out new concepts.
“Things that are normally too costly or time consuming to do in the physical can be accomplished with a few days of work on [Unreal Engine],” explained Ferrari’s Davide Ferrari. The luxury automaker uses the real-time 3D platform for photorealistic proof-of-concepts, made all the better with the recent innovation of real-time ray tracing.
“Ferrari is all about the quality of the materials, the experience, the exclusivity. Having a gam[e] engine like Unreal Engine allowed us to experience it in the best possible way,” Ferrari said.
Real-time 3D also offers a novel way to receive customer input into a design: VR focus testing. Wolff outlined how VIP customers could engage in virtual testing.
“You could bring them into the dealership and focus-test them on a new car concept under confidentiality rules. It’s in VR, so they can’t even take pictures of it away with them. And then you can see what it feels like for your top customers to get that sort of input into the design of the vehicle in a way that they never could, aside from flying everybody into a focus group at your headquarters,” Wolff said. Several automotive companies have expressed interest in this idea, he added.
Getting Customers Behind the Wheel
Real-time 3D platforms such as Unreal Engine can also play a big role for potential customers. Think of any racing video game where you can go to a menu and customize your car’s colors, wheels and more. Why not offer real-world drivers the same ability? Dealerships can provide virtual showrooms in which customers can browse virtual options and configure the exact car that they want.
According to Wolff, configurators are “often the entry point for using a game engine within an automotive business.” It’s an immediate and intuitive application of real-time 3D platforms, and one which customers highly appreciate. (You can see exactly how to create an automotive configurator in our four-part series Unreal Engine for Engineers.)
“Today, we have something in the dealership we call the driving experience,” Ferrari said. “At the end of the configuration process, we give out to the clients a video… to take away with the complete configuration of the Ferrari. And it’s all rendered in real time in Unreal Engine.”
It could go even further than a video—you could get a 3D model of your chosen vehicle and plug it into an actual video game and drive it around for a virtual test drive. For Ferrari, which manufactures to order, its customers can see much more easily the vehicles they intend to purchase.
“We have millions of combinations,” Ferrari continued. “Having everything pre-made was not possible anymore. So, the idea is that you could open up a configuration, change something on the go, send it back to the dealer, discuss with them whether you prefer this or that. This kind of interaction without having to be physically inside the dealership is also something that definitely pays justice to the times and the product itself.”
Marketing with Real-Time 3D
How do you inform your potential customers about your latest vehicle? There is the traditional way—print ads, TV commercials, maybe a spot on the radio. And then there is the way that’s actually going to reach people: directly inside their entertainment.
“Once this digital IP is created and it exists in Unreal [Engine], that means that it also exists in feature films,” Carroll said. Major studio releases like “The Mandalorian” and “Ford v Ferrari” use Unreal Engine for previsualization and visual effects. Product placement is not a new concept, but product placement before the product even exists? That’s something new.
“You see these environments being rendered in Unreal. When the car exists in Unreal, that means you can conceivably launch a car in a film,” Carroll continued.
Or in a video game, for that matter. In 2017, the then-unannounced BMW M5 was leaked in promo materials for the racing game Need for Speed: Payback. Whether the leak was intentional or not, it was effective at intriguing the automotive community. The M5 could be configured and driven in the game, just like the virtual test drive we mentioned earlier.
The possibility of debuting cars in movies or games is also on Ferrari’s radar.
“As gam[e] engines have breached the reality barrier they are becoming so realistic with the render[ing] of materials— difficult materials like carbon fiber, for example—or the introduction of ray tracing and full-volume lighting, that it’s becoming much more difficult to tell a real shoot from a virtual one. It’s definitely something we are interested in,” Ferrari said.
The Automotive Field Guide
We’ve seen several ways in which interactive 3D platforms like Unreal Engine are serving automotive companies, from offering dynamic design tools to innovative marketing opportunities. But we still haven’t touched on everything. Real-time 3D platforms are also changing how human-machine interfaces are designed (think of a car’s infotainment system), how manufacturing production lines can be made more effective, and much more.
For a deeper dive into real-time 3D as an automotive platform, download the new Automotive Field Guide from Epic Games or visit unrealengine.com to learn more.
