Car configurators have been a standard sales tool for automakers for some time now. Whether they’re customizing a new purchase in the dealership or testing out different looks online, customers expect to be able to explore different options before putting their money down.
Leading brands such as Pagani, Audi, BMW, McLaren, and Mercedes have turned this aspect of the sales process into an art form, harnessing powerful rendering techniques like ray tracing to create configurators that are ever more photorealistic and interactive.
So how are these interactive digital showrooms built? Well, Epic Games has just released a new sample project that enables anyone to find out for themselves.
The Automotive Configurator is a free real-time configurator sample, built in 3D creation tool Unreal Engine. The project shows off a completely interactive Audi A5 convertible model provided by Audi Business Innovation, set in an all-new immersive salt flat environment.
The idea behind the sample is to give you a jump start and reduce the initial steps required to build your own version of the configurators offered by major car brands. It provides the opportunity to dive under the hood of the technology used in today’s most advanced interactive digital showrooms.
You’ll be able to explore all the different components of Unreal Engine that make up the project, from the Blueprint visual scripts used to the Variant Manager. Importantly, there’s no custom software and no C++ coding used—virtually everything you see can be achieved in regular, vanilla Unreal Engine 4.26. The project demonstrates how the standard feature set that exists in Unreal Engine can be used to achieve stunning results.
You can customize your car with different paint colors, and change features that you’d expect to find in a dealership configurator, such as the wheels, trims, seats, interiors, and other standard variables. When you’re done, you can render out a short commercial using the Movie Render Queue.
The sample project also serves as a base for those in other industries to experiment with configurators for different types of product. Register for Epic’s upcoming webinar on April 21, where you’ll get a deep dive into the Automotive Configurator, which explains how to bring your own content into the project.
Epic Games has been building an ecosystem of resources to give the automotive industry a helping hand in adopting real-time technology. As explored in the company’s Automotive Field Guide, real-time innovation is set to be one of the key drivers for change across the automotive pipeline. Environments to showcase car designs—such as a sandy beach scene and bridge scene—high-quality automotive-themed materials and textures, and of course the engine itself, are all free to use.
The Automotive Configurator is the latest offering in this growing pool of resources. Want to explore it for yourself? Download the sample project today.