Dakar Experience
A full-3D rally car experience for Red Bull with Blank, driving the Dakar's landscapes in a single simulated shot.
Building the environment
I directed the piece and started by laying out the whole environment at real-world scale, defining the road shapes, the elevation and the mountains, so Jerome Levilly had a locked base to build the detailed 2 km road on top of, in Vue. It runs through the key landscapes of the Dakar, forest, mountain, canyon and desert, merged into one continuous drive. Thomas Charier, Jerome and Fcome modeled the assets, and Thomas and Jerome handled the shading and texturing.
The car simulation
This was the real challenge. I rigged the car and ran the whole simulation as a single continuous shot, with no cuts to hide behind. I placed every speed target, braking point and acceleration along the full path, then kept adjusting the road layout, elevation and turns until, after hundreds of iterations, the car behaved exactly like a rally car should through each environment. The speed and trajectory come from real physics: the car's weight, its suspensions, the engine torque and the shape of the terrain. I also rigged the camera to feel like a natural POV, reacting to the car's dynamics with the right amount of shake.
The rendering challenge
The pipeline was unusual. I imported the Vue scene into Cinema 4D and scattered thousands of trees and detailed assets at render time, rendering with C4D's native physical Global Illumination, the only renderer that could read the Vue scene back then. The whole thing had to render in one go under a single unified lighting for both the car and the environment, which pushed our hardware to its limit.
The video in situation
The film ran inside an interactive quiz on the Red Bull website: questions popped up at key moments and the player had to choose fast, like a co-driver.
Credits
Blank
- Concept
- Alexis Czornomaz
- Project Management
- Alexandre Veinand
Point Flottant Studio
- Direction & Creative Direction
- Mattias Peresini
- Environment Layout
- Mattias Peresini
- 3D Environment (Vue)
- Jerome Levilly
- 3D Modeling
- Thomas CharierJerome LevillyFcome
- Shading & Texturing
- Thomas CharierJerome Levilly
- Car Rig, Simulation & Camera
- Mattias Peresini
- Lighting & Rendering
- Mattias Peresini
- FX & Compositing
- Fcome
