Making Of ‘Au_XLR8R’ with Thomas Brown and the_kyza – Full CGI

Recom Farmhouse London are proud to present ‘Au_XLR8R – a Full CGI charged-up collision of leading artists in car design, CGI and photography.

Thomas Brown wanted to bring his unique vision to the world of automotive photography. He often works with a set designer to create a physical world, whether it’s a sci-fi storm for Wallpaper or explorations of volume and mass for Frame. For a car, only CGI can bring this freedom of vision.

Khyzyl Saleem‘s work (@the_kyza) is a high-octane mix of the wildest aspects of car design: evolved from the explosive creativity of gaming, founded in an in-depth knowledge of the realities which is fuelled by his bodykit business, extending those outrageous modifications to real-life cars.

Recom Farmhouse ourselves are always looking for new and energising ways to fuel the possibilities of full CGI. We asked Khyzyl if he could provide one of his models for us to work with. With this model, we would create a detailed virtual studio inspired by Thomas’s references, collaborate on the creation of a series of images in this digital set, and then grade them to perfection.

 

The Concept

Thomas’ reference roared and fizzed with energy for us to create his desert art space in an American landscape, an environment liminal in space, time and human intervention. The car would be set as a sculpture, with an elemental quality incorporating ideas of gold, particle collisions, sculpture & precision engineering.

The Car

Khyzyl chose a 1989/91 Porsche 944 Turbo KS combined with 2022/23 992 GT3 RS Variant to be the centrepiece of the installation. Thomas’s vision was a car of pure gold in colour: a glossy and perfect mirror finish, an outrageously extravagant paint job, full of interest with the complicated lighting.

 

The Studio

In Recom Farmhouse’s London studio, CGI artist Aljaz Bezjak created an outdoor studio in Blender as a setting for the car, complete with supports, rigging and power supply. The site has its own ecology and geology, with scrubby desert plants against a background of far mountains. These small ‘real world’ details are what’s vital in making the environment, grounding the exhilarating fantasy in a believable reality.

 

“Mesmerisingly beautiful interactions between particles as they collide at high speed sending them spiralling off from their trajectories. The images chart the path of a particle, chance impacts and ultimately how the influence of others can permanently change their course. ”

– Thomas Brown

The images were ‘shot’ in a very reality-based method, according to Thomas’ usual practice. He would choose a lens and ‘walk’ around the environment just as he would in a real studio, selecting viewpoints that are coherent with those limitations. The point of view could almost be that of an art tourist, taking phone pictures of this desert installation for Instagram, but with the quality that only this attention to detail can bring.

 

” A roadside monument to science, energy, engineering and human creativity.  Inspired by phenomena, physics, chemistry, innovation and teenage wonder.  The excitement of the Gold Rush, frantic exploration and pioneering in search of fortune and the future.”

– Thomas Brown

The final images are a riveting combination of reality and fantasy, on the border of night and day.
See the whole series on our site and on Behance

Photographer: Thomas Brown
Post Artist: Aljaz Bezjak / Recom Farmhouse London
Car Model: Khyzyl Saleem @the_kyza

 

 

 

100% – Porsche Panamera

We relished the challenge of creating this CGI Porsche Panamera in the rain for a campaign from Kemper Kommmunikation with photographer Erik Chmil.

Here’s a look into how we made it. There’s a selection of 100% crops to zoom in on the details, and a video where you can feast your eyes on the perfectly rendered raindrops on the CGI Porsche.

We used Autodesk VRED to make the car. This execution, with its intricate raindrops, was particularly interesting. The finished image (above) is packed with finely observed details.

As always, the CGI process is grounded in observations of reality. CGI artist Ivo Stanev spent time studying the interaction between the raindrops and the surface of the car. The water acts like hundreds of tiny lenses and we found the best way to light them was to use high resolution HDRI spheres.

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Due to their hemisphere shape, formed as the round drops hit a flat surface, the raindrops catch light from the many sources in a night scene like this- street lamps, headlights, windows and so on.  This is what makes them sparkle.

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Mapping techniques:
To do this, we used high-resolution rain textures with displacement mapping. However, because we wanted to be flexible it was important to react quickly to changes, so we used both triplanar and UV mapping (the process of projecting a 2D image to a 3D model’s surface for texture mapping )

Working with triplanar mapping gives us flexibility because we can easily change the form of the raindrops,  especially as the CGI modelled Porsche has High Density Geometry. A good example is the windshield, where UV mapping allowed is to model windscreen wipers with a specific movement. For the rest of the car we used triplanar mapping for flexibility.

It was important for us to show the effect of the wind, changing the shape of the raindrops as they move along the surface of the car’s body.

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Also some elements are not as simple to add as you might imagine! We wanted moving, blurred windscreen wipers of course…so we carefully painted where and how the raindrops moved, depending on the motion of the windscreen wipers.

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The rendering took a lot of time as well – we used full Global Illumination with a lot of samples…and of course only one HDRI sphere wasn’t enough, so we had to use two or three of them.

We are really pleased with the end result – the painstaking work paid off beautifully.

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Fly though the details in our video here…

Client: Porsche
Agency: Kemper Kommmunikation
Photographer: Erik Chmil
Creative Director: Nadine Kubis
Post-Artist: Thomas Fritz / Recom Stuttgart
CGI Artist: Eugen Albrandt / Recom Stuttgart
CGI Artist: Ivo Stanev / Recom Stuttgart

Making of : Porsche Cayman by Thomas Strogalski

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When we work on automotive images, we are usually asked to render cars into a photographic environment, but with the new Porsche Cayman GT4 it was exactly the opposite: Thomas Strogalski photographed a real car while the location was virtually created by our talented artists in Stuttgart.

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Strogalski beautifully shot the car for plenty of different angles and our team, captained by CGI director Thorsten Jasper Weese then designed and modelled the architecture of an underground parking lot to accommodate the cars. We also matched the photographic car to a CGI model in order to render the reflections of the surrounding location onto the shiny yellow varnish. Throughout the project it has been a very close collaboration between Thomas, art director Tim Buchmüller, creative director Norman Henke and us.

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Below few more images of the Cayman GT4.

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CREDITS:

Client: Porsche
Agency: Kemper Kommmunikation GmbH
Art Director: Tim Buchmüller
Creative Director: Norman Henkel
Photography: Thomas Strogalski
CGI Director: Thorsten Jasper Weese
Post Artists: Nele Ebner, Thomas Fritz, Tobias Scheuerer at Recom
CGI Artist: Ina Bostelmann at Recom

Paparazzi Style…

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A very long mirror lens with its shallow depth of field is what makes this image so peculiar and the strong backlight adds the mood to it! Thorsten-Jasper Weese from our Stuttgart studio travelled with Uli Heckmann to Mexico for a web special for the Panamera. Using such a long lens is really unusual in car photography as it flattens out the perspective, but the way Uli used it, it even highlights the unique sinuous curves of this car amidst the chaos of the city traffic. Although the car was entirely created in the computer, the final effect is definitely very natural. Click on it to see it 100%.

Posted by Christoph

CREDITS:

Client: Porsche
Agency: BB-K
Photographer: Uli Heckmann
Art Director: Martin Spies
CGI-Director: Thorsten Jasper Weese
CGI-Artist: Andreas A. Maurer
Post Artists: Jonas Braukmann, Uli Heckmann, Martin Spies