M8 Competition Launch Event: Virtual Reality Experience
The adoption of Virtual Reality (VR) technology has seen rapid growth in the past decade and has often proved to be a great tool to visualise large architectural and logistical scenarios before constructions of these spaces even start. Many QUT design interns have worked on various VR projects during their internships with the Academy or BMW Group.
As part of an immersive experience for the announcement event of our M8 Competition, we created a VR demo to show some of the work we do and the skills we have at the Academy. The virtual reality scene allowed our guests to traverse from a digital twin of our Beta Lab in Kelvin Grove (where the M8 is located), to a virtual factory closely resembling a BMW manufacturing plant in Germany. We wanted to show people what it is like to be inside a BMW factory and have a unique experience.
Beta Lab
To create a digital twin of the BMW Group + QUT Design Academy Beta Lab (room Z2-407), we used existing floor plans and the Architectural elevation drawings from the renovation of the room that began in late 2021. These measurements were critical so that we could build the room to the correct scale in the virtual world.
After modelling the room, we continued and modeled the entire Z2 building, Parer Place and surround buildings at Kelvin Grove campus. The environment was assembled as a rough draft using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4. As the digital twin of the Beta Lab room was being refined, we began creating our main showpiece of the launch night: The BMW M8 Competition.
The talented designers on our team recreated the M8 Competition in Blender, using lots 2D drawings and images of the vehicle as reference. We recreated the body panels, grilles and small details, head lights and tail lights, wheels and brakes as accurately as possible. Multiple revisions of the vehicle were required to ensure that the proportions were accurate.
The M8 was then placed into the Beta Lab model and this was when the VR scene really started to come to life. We used programs such as Adobe Substance Painter, as well as Unreal Engine’s automotive material library for the materials on the car and in the room. Photos of the exact ceramic and carpet tiles that were going into Beta Lab with the renovation were used on the floor in the 3D scene. Following this, many hours adjusting and refining the lighting in the scene was needed to get the scene looking just right.
BMW Factory
With the vehicle and Beta Lab model and scene mostly complete, the next stage was to begin constructing the digital twin of BMW manufacturing plant, made to look like one of their factories in Germany. Many of the 3D assets needed to create a replica of one of BMW’s factories had already been constructed by the Academy team, through some of our Special Projects like our 3D Asset Creation + Library and SORDI projects. Taking reference from our collective experience in Germany, as well as photo references, we wanted to show what a real BMW production plant looks like.
Production lines, lane ways and and other key factory areas were replicated in the VR scene, with many of our 3D assets placed throughout. Lighting the scene was extra important for this part of the VR experience, not only to show the assets but to also replicate the brightness and make the environment feel like as accurate as possible.
Thanks for reading,
Tim Lim
Junior Design Associate
