I’m not going to shine a new light on Darwin’s 160-year-old theory of evolution, but I am going to explain some of the story that occurred before the realitme innovation I described in my previous article.
If you read my Innovation article, you will understand how Burrows innovated to use gaming software to start to change how we create visual content. The story I told was based over the last 2 years of Burrows. That period is only the most recent example of our innovative, some would say pioneering, approach to Product Visualisation.
Burrows was formed in 1963 and for the first 35 years they way we created an image of a product was to photograph it. We didn’t do the photography ourselves, but we concepted the image, art directed the shoot and did the post production work. This was largely done for Ford and just for the UK market.
As the pressure came for us to be able to create images earlier and earlier and the photo units were available later and later we looked at alternatives to photography. So, in the late 1990’s we started to develop our CGI capabilities. In 1998 we delivered our first CGI project for Ford. This was 4 years before Monsters Inc was released and 6 years before DreamWorks was founded.
This stage of our Product Visualisation evolution is what you could call Origination. We create still images and animations without having a product. Normally we use the OEM’s CAD data and if that is not available we can model the data based on an actual product, drawings or photographic references. This work started with technical images expanding to cover studio type images, location images and then we started to move the camera to create animations. These animations can range from simple 360’s to dynamic film of the product in motion. They can feature areas that the eye normally sees by flying around the product or, using the true power of CGI, they could go where the human eye or traditional camera can’t - inside the workings of the product.
As we pushed the technology and imagination further we developed our ability at bringing product stories to life to help explain the feature/benefit of a product. This we now call engaging story telling.
Throughout the 2000’s we developed our technical abilities to manipulate OEM CAD and refined creative abilities to light cars so that we were delivering fully photorealistic images and animations. The problem with being a fast starter is that other soon follow and learn from the leader. By the late 2000’s we found that we were in a beauty pageant where there were a number of CGI studios producing some very good bespoke CGI. This meant that client decisions became subjective and the work became commoditised, lead to a race to the bottom in terms of price. Not I race we wanted to win!
At the same time, we found that our clients were creating more and more personalisable content and offering a slightly different product line-up across different markets around the globe. We knew that we would have to be able to recreate the extremely high asset quality across multiple markets and for multiple product lines. So, to be able to move our Image Creation to the next level and avoid the commoditisation of the bespoke image we started to build Automation Tools. These allowed us to create amazing CGI content, product correct for any country around the world. In a recent Ford launch, Burrows created over 150,000 High resolutions images correct across 60 different National Sales Companies.
So, we had moved from just creating one stunning image to creating 150,000 stunning images. We enhanced the tools to become more cost efficient and to be more flexible in their outputs. But, again, others followed so we searched for the next step change for Burrows.
That came in 2014 when we started to partner with Epic Games as they moved from just gaming, into enterprise and the automotive industry in particular. They picked us to partner with as they recognised our abilities at lighting cars and wanted to combine that realism with the power of UE4. This was the birth of Burrows move into Realtime work.
Three years after this we created our strategic vision ‘staying ahead of the innovation curve’ and the rest as they say……..is described in my Innovation article.
by Richard Wright
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