Ford Bronco
In 2020 Ford built a Virtual Production stage in order to show case their new vehicles. One of these was the all new Ford Bronco and it’s incredible off-road capabilities. Mendez Creative’s responsibility was to optimize the Bronco’s CAD data, dataprep and materialize it for Unreal Engine 4.
Credit: Imagination / Ford
Software: Unreal Engine, Maya
Dataprep:
We took the Bronco’s engineering CAD and removed all unnecessary data like engine, belts, bolts and all unseen surfaces - these parts were never going to be seen so were safely removed. We then took the remaining visible data and aggresively decimated it down to a manageable poly count (~20 million tris to ~3 million).
Vector Displacement:
A portion of the presentation had a real-time demonstration of rock-climbing on a virtual set. This meant setting up reactive steering and vector displacement where the tire came into contact with the rock. This was achieved by creating a blueprint that contained the tire geometry as well as an empty actor that acted as a target for the vector displacement. The movement of the target was driven by the angle of the vehicle body in relation to the world.
Below you can see how moving this empty actor causes the local vectors to displace and “bulge”:
Materialization:
An additional contribution by Mendez Creative was creating the materials for the Bronco. Using approved CMF documents as well as pre-production images as reference, we gave the Bronco it’s final material look. Below is the final Bronco paint in Metallic Cyber Orange :)
Animation created by Imagination.