WUSA9 in Washington D.C. designed a new ECO friendly live broadcast truck. This project was to show off the new vehicle and all of its features. They took a base Toyota Highlander and heavily modified it.

Final Major Deliverables

Concept Moodboard

The initial pitch I created for this was a paper environment with a semi realistic hero car. I wanted an “environmental” theme to be present, and I thought a “recyclable” paper world might be an interesting take for this vehicle explainer. The client wanted a more realistic car, so I opted to go with that, allowing the glossy car contrast with the diffuse surroundings.

Process

With the compressed timeframe to complete the project before showing it to potential sponsors, I jumped into 3D to work out some of the difficult technical problems. I sourced a Toyota Highlander model from turbosquid and started creating the customizations required to make the finished model. Once those were in a good spot, I turned my attention to the stylized low-poly environment and gathered a few assets – 3 styles of trees, a couple rocks, etc. I created the landscape with Blender’s landscape tool, used a hair system to distribute items across the geometry and used a Boolean modifier to make the landscape conform to an isometric cube.

Style Frames

Animation

Once I was feeling good about a still frame, I wanted to work on the transformation from stock to Eco 9. I quickly rigged the car to give it suspension, COM, and tire controls.

Thinking of how one might make those changes in real life, lead me to “jack” up each corner of the car to change the tires. The roof rack was a little more difficult as I wanted it to be “built” on the roof. I tried a few different routes to create that effect, but I settled on things dropping from the celing.

While there are some things I didnt love about this test, I felt like the transformation animation was coming along nicely. I felt like the environment was leaving something to be desired, along with some of the animations feeling slow and ridged.

I started working on blocking out the animation for the whole piece, adding details to the environment, and thinking about how 2D motion graphics might add some interest to the animation.

Overall, this was looking really close to what I was hoping for. There are many glitches/rendering artifacts from the boolean operation, but the project was on the right track. From here, I needed to clean up the technical issues with rendering, finalize the 3D animation, and work on the motion graphics side of things.

I added some more flare to the transformation animation with the wrapping of the car, blocked in sound effects, and started to get the motion graphics moving how I wanted. I used this as one last check to ensure I wasn’t missing anything major, and to be able to review my work since the deadline was approaching.

I made all of my notes on things to fix – some popping in the motion graphics, any bad frames (with artifacts), and I wanted the end of the animation to do more (as I felt it was a bit boring). To fix the end, I added the logo of the client and the car to the “floor”, and added a few more cars dropping in to show it becoming the “industry standard.” With those changes, the final was rendering for delivery.

Final (Original)

Conclusion

The initial explainer (above) led the client to sell a sponsorship to Toyota for over $1M. After that, the client designed a wrap for the official vehicle, so we updated the animation to the new wrap design. The rest of the graphics came shortly after, to create a full package, for use on broadcast, ott, and in their native app.