Ready, Set, Render - How Design Launch Night 2021 was Built in Keyshot

In early 2021, as we continued to work from home, we depended more heavily upon digital platforms to develop both the team and our 2021 driverless-electric challenger. So our team saw a unique opportunity to deepen our knowledge of the tools at our disposal. This newly derived ability to work more flexibly within both in-person and online contexts has carried through to 2021 as we return to the workshop.

In late April of 2021, MMS held our first large-scale in-person event in over 15 months - Design Launch Night. While M21’s design was still to be validated through physical testing, the fundamental vehicle concept had been laid in intricate detail by our ‘work-from-home’ army of CAD and part designers. Before a single part had been moulded, machined or milled, our team saw this event as an opportunity to truly showcase nine months worth of detailed CAD and design work. Thus, we turned to our rendering package of choice, Keyshot. 

Keyshot 10 is supplied to us by our Platinum Sponsor, LEAP Australia, and is a tool frequently used within Monash University’s Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (MADA) to showcase product design regardless of the CAD or modelling platform. For Monash Motorsport’s Business Department, this was an opportunity to elevate the team’s in-house storyboarding and visualisation capabilities in a cost and time-effective manner. 

In preparation for Design Launch Night, our team relied on Keyshot for teaser renderings too.

Preparation

The overall production process began with the simultaneous execution of pre-visualisation and pre-render setup and concluded with the frame-by-frame rendering of the final product. Simple plans, however, can often be deceiving, and the time-sensitive nature of this task meant that much of the planning and visualisation had to be motivated by functionalism and simplicity; the overall goal is to showcase the design of our car as clearly as possible.

The Keyshot video production process is quite simple (in theory).

Pre-visualisation

The team aimed to develop a video which showcased key vehicle parts in a seamless single take. With an understanding of the fundamental animation tools available in Keyshot, the team sought to create a visually interesting, but functionally practicable suite of camera movements that could be easily executed within a short timeframe. 

Renders also enable us to highlight specific parts with contrasting textures.

Pre-render Setup

Rendering is not a fundamental part of our engineering design process and must therefore cater to the various challenges introduced by CAD; our use of CAD aims for engineering efficiency and accuracy rather than aesthetics. Keyshot offers simple and versatile tools for CAD ingestion and texturing, but the process of texturing a master model with thousands of unique parts can only be completed part-by-part or through the grouping of similarly textured parts. Given that the part designers do not texture their parts in CAD, this somewhat piecemeal approach to visualisation is simply a by-product of the fact that our CAD is built for engineering rather than renders. A more efficient approach to rendering, by fundamentally starting our modelling process with Keyshot in mind, would ultimately affect the engineering efficiency of the team. 

Often the most intricate part of rendering is the texturing process.

Animation Setup

Keyshot’s user experience is analogous to physical camera setup and relatively easy to understand when contextualised with its physical reference. Aperture, focal length, and shutter speed all behave within the digital environment as they would in real life, and the same understanding can be easily extrapolated to visual animation when it comes to timing and measuring out various camera movements like dolly’s, pans and orbits.

Complex movements are easy to set up with Keyshot Animation. This shot contains a four-component animation.

Ready, Set, Render

With a bit of trial and error, our storyboard was quite easily converted to Keyshot animation, leaving us with nothing more to do than fire up the CPU (Central Processing Unit).

Our team completed this project over the course of approximately two weeks, from the completion of the CAD master model, to the final exported video. The entire process was completed in-house, with the use of only team members’ concepts and computers available to us. While Keyshot has in-built functionality that far surpasses what was showcased in the final product, the Design Launch Night video render was, ultimately, an exercise in balancing practicality and imagination. 

With such experience under our belts, the Business Department can only look forward to further challenging the possibilities made available to us by Keyshot.