Blackbird, a car rig that creates photo-real CG cars [video]

I work at a competitor to The Mill so I have a little insight into this process. Ad agencies have grown accustomed to spending an enormous amount of money on VFX to make the cars in their spots look as perfect and attractive as possible (same with soda, people&#x27;s faces, etc). They call this &quot;beauty&quot; work. For high end commercials this single line item can be over $30k (though I&#x27;m pretty sure The Mill charges more than I do). Most of the car commercials I do end up with full CG cars regardless of what they shoot because 1 they want the cars to look perfect, 2 they want to enhance the cars attractive qualities beyond all reality, 3 they want to be able to control every pixel, 4 they want to change elements of the car for different markets. That last one is probably a big reason The Mill would invest this kind of R&amp;D in the project.<p>Doctorpangloss&#x27;s point about product placement is no small thing either. As foreign markets become a bigger part of box office take being able to sell 5 different product placement deals in the same 20 shots is a big win.

In case anyone is wondering why you would use a CG car instead of a real car: The purpose of this vehicle is to allow large feature films to shoot with the Blackbird and sell a product-placed vehicle in post-production to the highest bidder. It&#x27;s a brilliant way to maximize the value of the placement.<p>The Mill obviously doesn&#x27;t spell this out in their press release. But this is all about native advertising.

I find it a bit sad that so much tech has been put into advertising, which, as an industry is inefficient and a costly zero sum game.

The video looks super fake at around 1:05. The rear wheel is in the wrong spot.

But how do you film somebody getting in and out of the car?

So it draws a shell atop the stand in? That isn&#x27;t enough. It doesn&#x27;t seem to model flex, body roll, vibration or even accurate suspension movements. It won&#x27;t fool car guys.

Why do you need a rig? Can&#x27;t ML algorithms predict what kind of movements a car should make to look realistic?

But how do you chroma key the blackbird out of the video?

My only dream is to one day invent something as clever and useful as this (and to produce a marketing video as succinct and informative).

So now car ads can be even less honest than they already were.<p>Great.

So its hasicaly designed to lie to consumers, so that even that product ads they are seeing are completly fake.

Most car sites now allow the end user to customize their car with color, trim &amp; options. I can see this being used to give the end-user a realistic view of what the car will look like.<p>Mass customization of cars is increasingly possible with high-end 3D printers and tech like this may allow you to insert your own idea of what your car will look like into a Hollywood style commercial.<p>At the end of the day, car commercials already show people drifting around corners and skidding to a stop. Realistic commercials of cars stuck in traffic isn&#x27;t going to move any units.