Understanding the impact of electrification in automotive design.
Entering the age of electrification and autonomous driving, traditional attributes of automomtive luxury continue to be questioned and rethought. Modern technologies influence proportions, dimensions and layout, changing the vehicle‘s architecture like never before. With autonomous driving, the interaction between the vehicle, its passengers and environment will change.
Client: Internal Project
Automotive, Mobility
Industries:
Design Research, Ideation, Digital Prototyping, Concept Visualization
Redefining Architecture.
Inspired by Audi`s credo „Vorsprung durch Technik“, the final selection in the sketch-phase fell on the idea of clearly distinguishing between the technological and the human aspects of a car. Therefore the architecture of the car is clearly devided between two „technology parts“ holding the „human part“, called „bubble“ between them. The technological parts holding the passengers between them also symbolize an electrified version of the „quattro“ four wheel drive system , that Audi is famous for.
This allowed to explore different materials, colors, and lighting scenarios, gaining a deeper understanding of how different designs directions would look and function in the real world. The early polygonal proportion mock-ups proved to be an invaluable tool for developing the selected design direction. The resulting visualizations helped to bring ideas to life in an compelling, exciting and informative way.
Execution.
Based on these final renderings I started the modelling process in Autodesk Alias. Having a polygon-model as a base was an advantage, since it could be used as a 3D tape during the modelling process.
Therefore I could focus on the execution and surface quality without thinking about the proportions, since the proportions had already been defined in the polygon-stage. After modelling in Alias I tesselated the model and exported it as FBX-file. The FBX-file was imported into Blender for the visualisation process.
