Indigo user David Gudelius (zeitmeister on the forums) and his colleagues at the CGI company Michel de Vries, were tasked with creating the official press trailer for Porsche AG's new Panamera Executive model.

The animation sequences were rendered primarily using Indigo, and David has kindly agreed to talk about the process of making the trailer.

The quality in the shots is outstanding, congratulations! Was it difficult to achieve?

First of all, thank you very much!
Achieving our idea of the output quality was not very difficult. It mainly depends on render time per frame plus post production and color grading. The great lighting system of Indigo does the magic more or less automatically when you use a physically correct environment... that’s why we chose Indigo.

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VFX is famous for its tight schedules; were any tricks needed to get the production done on time, and if so, why were they needed?

Especially in automotive visualization it happens quite often that some car parts, colors or complete endowments change just until the calculated inhouse data prep deadline and beyond. This is quite normal, because the detail specification process is really complex on the part of the manufacturer... in particular with interior data. Because of these tight corrections and due to the source data sets we decided to fall back on our main visualization software, Autodesk VRED for urgent re-rendering of the car interior shots.

But next time, who knows?

What would you say was the most difficult part of this project, and how did you deal with it?

I’d say that the most difficult part of that job was the render time estimation of that tricky indoor lighting. We spend some time on tests to achieve the best result in balance of render time and quality. Thanks to really good hints of Indigo forum users and the developers we achieved a satisfying result.

It would be very interesting to know what kind of render times you had for the shots, and what hardware was used; can you share any info with us?

The render time per 4K frame was about 70-90 minutes, using one CPU. We rendered the complete animation on our inhouse render farm with 20 nodes.

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Why did you choose Indigo Renderer for this project over other rendering engines?

We simply love the lighting and the realistic look. Without the need of tweaking and faking light situations or GI render settings, Indigo simply renders it as it is... and so we can fully concentrate on color grading and subtle post production. Almost like you would do it with real filmed footage.

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Indigo 4 with GPU rendering is available in public beta since a while now, have you used this capability? Please let us know what features you would like to see to use it in production.

Our render farm runs on fast CPU render slaves with integrated graphics, so GPU rendering doesn’t make sense with our hardware equipment at the moment. But if the development and speed of GPU rendering continues that way, the time will come to consider some changes, for sure.

Some features like simultaneous multipass output would save a lot of time when using Indigo in VFX - a world coordinate normal pass, a specular pass, masks etc. Plus, we can’t wait of the return of the region render!!! :-)) (Developer's note: coming in the next beta!)

Big thanks for agreeing to do this feature with us David, we hope to see more from you in the future!

Thank you very much!

Finally we are very happy having the chance to do the job with such a great and fast unbiased renderer!

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