While working as an Art Director at Orange Comet, I was tasked with creating a visual look and feel as well as animated teaser concept for a speculative project for the Andretti Formula E race team. This project was intended to be Andretti Autosport's first foray into the web3 "metaverse". As such, I wanted to capture the high speed grittiness of Formula E and motorsports and merge it with a sleek, cutting edge tech space to blur the line between physical and digital.
LOOK DEVELOPMENT
I started to develop the look for the project by reimagining the Andretti Autosport logo. Dark matte steel and luminescent panels created a very futuristic, Tron-like appearance while keeping the layout and graphic shapes consistent with the current logo.
Next, I used a similar approach to redesign Andretti's current FormulaE liveries. Simplifying the color palette, mixing matte steel with luminescent color panels, and adding some fun glowing tires added some serious sci-fi horsepower.
ANIMATED TEASER
When planning out the beats of the animated teaser, We wanted to feature the real Formula E vehicle 'breaking through' to the metaverse and transforming to its digital counterpart.
As a proof of concept I assembled some renders to explore what that moment would look like, making use of Blender's Geometry Nodes to create an interesting procedural disintegration effect.
ANIMATION
I decided to take advantage of Unreal Engine's City Sample project as the first location in the animated teaser. My process was: export the route through the city that I wanted the vehicle to follow from Unreal to blender, then rig and animate the vehicle in Blender, then bring it back into Unreal as an FBX, and animate the video using a series of level sequences inside a master edit. This way I was able to make use of Blender's bone constraints to produce realistic procedural motion and vibration for the vehicle, while using Unreal Engine to iterate on camera angles and shot composition in real time.
I modeled, animated, and rendered the tunnel and metaverse sequence entirely in Blender.
Watch the full animated teaser below.
Thank you for watching!