Exterior lighting

Background

This exterior lighting project aims for a car model in 2020, which turns out to be the Car Concept ET7 Preview presented at the Shanghai Auto show.

Car exterior lighting is a powerful interface for car branding and communication with the environment (other cars, other drivers, pedestrians),

My roles in this project were

• Exploring the use cases for exterior lighting
• Implemented the lighting animation for different scenarios
• Translate the animation to executable engineering parameters, optimizing implementation pipelines.

Use cases for the production series ET7

Constrained by the current exterior lighting regulation, the current lighting scenarios can only focus on static use cases: When the car parks/starts/stops.

Dev toolbox and production test

Some clips are created for understanding production bottlenecks. For example:

• Individual controls
• Brightness
• Transition
• Direction

The following is developed in OctaneRender to reach “real-time”

Process

These lighting designs were based on the metaphors and the research study based on exterior lighting communication. The perception and tranlsation of different lighting effcts need to have mapping with natural interaction. As this project focuses more on production cars, the lighting design emphasizes much on the branding effects and “fun” use cases.

Framework

If the car was a human, then the light would be like eyes.

Metaphors and styling moodboard

Visual effects output

All the visual effects were created in Adobe After Effects / C4D / Unity for quickly exploring and generating transition. All the animations were reproduced with self developed tool to tranlsate len control timeline into production spreadsheet.

3D environment prototype for virtual testing

We also used Unity/Unreal to test the backlight/frontlight for generating the real feeling.

VR prototype for ET7 Preview

VR prototype for EVE

ET7 lighting concept presented at the Shanghai Autoshow 2019