3D environment for automotive spot – NISSAN Altima

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3D environment for automotive spot – NISSAN Altima

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3D environment for automotive spot around a live-action car shoot

For this Nissan Altima project, unlike typical automotive commercials where the vehicle is created digitally and the background is real, the car and driver were filmed in the studio, and we created and animated the surrounding 3D environment for the automotive spot entirely in 3D. This approach required precise integration of live-action elements, careful attention to camera perspectives, lighting, and reflections, ensuring a cohesive and realistic final composite. Quite a challenge, since the elaborate TV-commercial for the Saudi-Arabian market was to be produced on a very tight schedule.

To create the illusion of movement, a newly created, playable LED system was installed above and to the sides of the car, which handled most of the reflections on the car paint and the windows. The camera tracking shots were then converted to 3D-cameras and a digital double of the car added to the 3D-scenes. This opened up the possibility of both getting the necessary additional reflections of the created digital environment and to exchange the tires with rendered but actually turning ones.

City building

The main task of us artists was to create and animate the predefined stylized environment the car travels through. We had to build countless buildings and landmarks composed of objects reminiscent of Arabic symbols, that “grew” over time when the car passed them. Cinema 4Ds cloner- and field system we used for that purpose was nearly brought to its knees though, and only with the power of Redshift and the help of a very reliable external render farm I already had experience with [ranchcomputing], were we able to hold the deadline and produce the 15 shots in just under four weeks.

Particles instead of geometry

Apart from the complex compositing and the additional 2D-animations, the client wished for an additional effect: the car should dynamically grow its own traffic lane while moving through the world. Markus Feder developed a system in X-Particles, that used ever changing and growing 2D-forms to stay consistent with the already developed look.

See below for some additional still images (click for full resolution).