Epic Games and Car Design News announced a Unreal Engine HMI Design Challenge in February. Naturally we had to jump on the opportunity and show our skills with my colleagues. We have been building Unreal Based HMI´s for some vehicle manufacturers in the past year and have a lot of experience in this. Usually OEMs have their own designers who create the design to ensure that the brand look is desinged exactly the way they envision it. This was the first time we could create our own design and bring it to life with Unreal Engine.
The competition website describes what are the requirements and rules of the competition.
Epic Games provided a template project as a starting point.
We decided to change the screen layout to fit more content on the screen. Our design included two different driving modes. Autonomous & Sport. The HMI was designed to react to voice commands and many interactions were stitched together to bring the HMI to life.
The creation process evolved very naturally as team members used software they were comfortable using. Some elements were implemented in Unreal directly and some were animated in After Effects. All the elements were then composited together in AE so that it could be rendered as one single image sequence and placed on the screen in Unreal.
We altered the cockpit design in Unreal adding exterior lights, a car interior with leather material and reflective glass on the screen among other tweaks.
The Unreal camera sequence was rendered to a image sequence that was converted to video, placed in video editing software where all the audio editing could be handled conveniently. Stock muisc and generated voice overs were added and audio/video fades added.
We planned a storyboard with each interaction taking place after each other so that it could be rendered out to a 1 minute video, which was required to be submitted to the competition.
The deadline for sending our submission was 31.3. and soon judges will select the winner. Fingers crossed =)
It was a big push to finish in time with our ambitions concept. Long rendering time of the 1 minute sequence was a bit of a problem as iterating changes and reviewing those with the whole team took a long time.
Concept, designs, 3d models, animations, environment, camera movements, video & audio editing and project management was done by the great team including:
- Agata Deregowska
- Kamil Juszkiewicz
- Jakub Dobrowlanski
- Michal Matczak
- Marek Sikorski
- Viktor Baluszynski
- Odyseusz Spiridis
- Piotr Chochol
- Kacper Ogorzelec
- Tomasz Synowski
- Kajetan Walczak
- Jouni Leino
- Veli-pekka Kurtelius
- Maciej Usielski
Hopefully I didn´t forget anyone.