Two students create stunning real-time ray tracing automotive project

Hi! I’m Valentin Bécart, a digital design student studying at ISD Rubika in France. I started learning Unreal Engine last year and my goal has become to work in the automotive industry. I’m here to showcase how my two-person team developed the Genesis Essentia real-time experiment using Unreal, which was a passion project of ours. The Hyundai concept car you see in the video was designed by professional automotive designer Sasha Selipanov, and my friend and development partner Odilon Loïez modeled it for our project.

With this project, we really wanted to establish an efficient pipeline we could leverage moving forward. Odilon was in charge of the Blender phase, the model of the car, all the Data Prep to use the model in real time, and the rig of the vehicle to create the animation. My job was to work with Unreal and all the visualization aspects. 

We chose Unreal Engine over pre-calculated software because of its ability to render images and videos in real time, coupled with the fact that the engine started offering ray tracing support. It’s an aspect we were excited to experiment with. 

For modeling toolset, we decided to use Blender because it’s a powerful free software. Odilon had also been using it for years, thanks in large part to his last internship at KISKA, a design agency in Austria.

We went with Unreal Engine, in part, because a lot of automotive companies are including the tech in their pipeline. We also like how Unreal has the ability to create high-quality real-time ray-traced images and videos. In addition, thanks to my last internship at Light & Shadows, I’ve learned a lot about how to incorporate data within a real-time engine. 

Throughout the process, we also leveraged Unreal Engine’s VR capabilities, which we found very helpful to visualize our materials and the volume of the car. 

Below, you can see the final model Odilon made using Blender: