top of page
Harley-Davidson
Digital Feet Case Study
Project Description
H-D has required us to clear numerous production hurdles in order build a CG pipeline for a "major American manufacturer". Below is an overview of some of solutions I've helped to develop over the course of 6 years. From 2014 to 2020 I put a significant amount of effort into developing workflows, the CG pipeline, hundreds of software tools and scripts, asset management tools, standardized material libraries, render workflows, cloud rendering, and researching new tools and technologies capable of meeting the needs of Harley-Davidson.
Roles & Responsibilities
Technology & Innovation Lead
Research & Development
Pipeline & Software Development
Location/Environment Capture
Asset Management
Material Library Creation
3D Artist
Compositing
Digital Fleet
While at Clutch we were able to build a fleet of over 50 CG vehicles. Every year we were responsible for delivering renders, at a high resolution, in every paint and pin combination as well as special configurations for global markets. Often, delivering these renders would mean producing a photo-real render of a bike that wouldn't physically exist for months. This required close collaboration with styling, engineering, and marketing teams deliver images faithful to the eventual real vehicle.
Component Renderings
At Clutch we were able to build and maintain a fleet of over 50 CG vehicles. Every year we were responsible for delivering renders, at a high resolution, in every paint and pin combination as well as special configurations for global markets. Often, delivering these renders would mean producing a a photo-real render of a bike that wouldn't physically exist for months. This required close collaboration with styling, engineering, and marketing teams deliver images faithful to the eventual real vehicle. Having full access to a vehicle's CAD and moving every component along allowed us to peal away a bike to reveal the inner workings of the vehicle. This allowed us to talk about and demonstrate the functionality and systems of a vehicle not just swapping parts and changing paints.
Photo-Realism
At Clutch we were able to build and maintain a fleet of over 50 CG vehicles. Every year we were responsible for delivering renders, at a high resolution, in every paint and pin combination as well as special configurations for global markets. Often, delivering these renders would mean producing a a photo-real render of a bike that wouldn't physically exist for months. This required close collaboration with styling, engineering, and marketing teams deliver images faithful to the eventual real vehicle. To remain as efficient as possible and allow better feedback while doing look dev we began to migrate our fleet to new 3D software packages and render software. A major focus of mine in this migration process was to produce materials that were physically accurate and behaved well under any lighting condition. Part of what allowed us test performance under various lighting conditions was to build a look dev scene and pipeline that included a wide range of lighting scenarios and surfaces to test our materials against.
Interactive Web - 360
The 360's were one of our most consumer facing projects and were consistently one of H-D's most visited sections on the website for many years. Our Photo-real rendering combined with our knowledge of location capture gave Harley-Davidson the ability to set the tone for each vehicle while giving the consumer a true sense of its components, paints, and wheels. The user could control 30 different angles to view the vehicle from walking around the bike to getting on the and looking down at the infotainment system / gauge clusters. These 360's were produced for every vehicle every year up until 2019.
