Traffic Speed Deflectometer
Published by on July 9th, 2006
No, don’t panic, it’s not gone all geeky in a completely different direction round here… The TSD is a very sophisticated road test vehicle developed for the Highways Agency by TRL.
This little project gave me the excuse to upgrade and get my teeth back into something I haven’t done in a few years: 3D modeling. My application of choice is the very capable Cinema4D from Maxon.
The project consisted of creating two 3D rendered views plus two vector (Adobe Illustrator) drawings of the vehicle, demonstrating its construction and test equipment interior. Although not to be ‘CAD-accurate’, the images were to be used for the launch presentation and to demonstrate capability of the vehicle. Some artistic decisions were made to more clearly show elements of the interior and exterior, particularly not creating every element in every detail - just enough to get the message across.
Just in case you do not know about such things, the first two images are the 3D model/renders, and the second pair the vector illustrations. It’s possible, with a plugin-in, to export a C4D scene as an Illustrator document, but there was a need to ensure that the vector illustration was logically constructed and layered to ensure ease of producing a variety of images displaying different aspects of the vehicle and its interior equipment. Low resolution renders of the 3D model were, of course, used as the basic template for the vectors, thus keeping time and cost down to sensible levels.
This was the first time I had rendered using Global Illumination (Radiosity) in C4D. This technique creates a must more realistic end result, but does mean the render times are a great deal longer than standard ray-tracing (about 28 hours for one of the renders before I properly sussed out the most appropriate settings!). Well worth the extra time in this case, I think.
I was actually sat watching one of the renders build line by line, and realised the process reminded me of developing black and white prints in my old darkroom. It is a process which, if I ever get the opportunity to do it again, will never cease to excite me as the image slowly appears on the exposed paper. The only difference of course, is that 3D renders can take many hours each to complete, and the final images of the above truck each had three renders to composit together to enable reveals of various bits of equipment.
Now, if only the client had the budget for some animation…
