Harley-Davidson VPM
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Overview
Harley-Davidson has a huge variety of custom paints and graphics that make the design of the product so unique. Visualizing those paints and graphics has always been a challenge for internal teams and key stake holders at the enterprise and dealership level. The design team at HD had been using a legacy tool called the Virutal Paint Matrix (VPM) which comprised of static renders that allowed them to create masks for further tweaking in Photoshop. HD needed a modern solution that would improve their product visualization and design process.
Approach
Unreal Engine is the current best in class rendering tool for real time visualization, but using it requires an artist who knows the technology and a machine that can power it. We broke this barrier by building a tool that allowed inexperienced users to make adjustments to the bike paint, graphic sets and design elements, and made it accessible through the browser by pixel stream. This allowed a select amount of users to launch the app through their existing machine at any time and customize a bike with a virutally unlimited amount of design options. From the app, the user can then export a production quality image or video, virtually indestinquishable from their existing product imagery. The result was a tool that not only made it possible for the design team to visualize product color and graphics combinations like never before, but also to re-utilize those assets for marketing purposes.
One goal with this app was to minimize the quality difference between the real time graphics, and the export renders. Closing this gap meant that product designers could fine tune their designs without worrying that the production quality renders would shift important qualities such as paint flake or reflections.
To create consistency in imagery across the team, we built several cameras within the app that the user can snap to. This allows every user to export images from the same set of parameters.
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It was important for us to build the UI in a language that was native to the language used already by the design team. This meant that anybody knew to the team or the tool would be able to jump into the app with a minimial learning curve.
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Because of the increased speed to render, many useful types of images that had not been previously included in design pack sets could now be included.
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One of the most powerful aspects of the real time rendering was the new ability to get a camera very close to the paint for fine tuning of properties.
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