When I first started working at Animech Technologies, we didn’t have any recent showcases. And with the recent release of Marmoset Skyshop bringing physically based rendering to Unity 4, we got to work on a simple car configurator. The goal was to make a photorealistic car that was configurable.
To keep production costs low, we bought a Volkswagen Passat model. However, some additional modeling tweaks was required to make it optimized for realtime use. Next, I unwrapped and baked the car using VRay. Both GI and ambient occlusion was used to give the bake some extra punch. I then brought the car into Unity and set up the Marmoset materials, using photos of the car as reference images.
Up until this point, we had used a HDRI as a backdrop. However, we felt the application needed something more. To increase the realism, we needed a proper 3D environment to put it in. After some discussions, we decided to place the car in a hangar, which I modeled, textured and lit. I baked the hangar lighting to textures, and imported it in Unity. In order to get the car to reflect the hangar in Unity, I rendered out a latitude/longitude HDRI of the hangar using VRay’s spherical camera mode. The HDRI was brought into Unity and processed through Marmoset Skyshop. We now had a car, a hangar, and lighting to match. It was now up to the programmers to make it configurable.
