Ram Trucks Website

interactive toolsets for reflection painting, illustration effects, prototyping, and more

Artwork production

For more information on the ramtrucks.com project and my role as art director, check out the Ram Trucks article posted in the Productions section. The toolsets described here were developed exclusively for Vectorform as part of the ramtrucks.com production.

One of the challenges of the project was creating such a large number of assets for interactive use in an online experience with minimal team members. Key to this was automation and robust pipeline development.

VFX pipeline

With the support of Jordan Savage's command line renderer, I developed image kernels and VFX passes in Quartz Composer to automate as much of the art production process as possible. The vehicle cutaway effects were especially complicated, with a number of layers that needed to be precisely developed for the final online experience.

One of the specific tools I created allowed the team to interactively paint reflection maps using rendered normal maps. This was a highly efficient way to near-instantly build out glassy reflection passes on individual overlays, and could be easily reused for subsequent overlays if needed. The tool played a critical role in the final cutaway effects, and was widely lauded as a huge improvement in the workflow, making it possible to quickly illustrate effects that would have otherwise never been created in time for final delivery.

2D illustration effects were also created using custom image kernels with individual controls for each input channel (including depth and camera space normals maps). These were largely built on my previous development of non-photoreal post processing effects, and allowed us to quickly animate technical illustrations in 3D without ever resorting to actual hand drawn lines. Again, this allowed us to create a large number of high quality assets quickly, efficiently, and on time.

Additional file automations were created as OSX Services, providing the team with tools to greatly simplify the task of formatting and compressing files for final deployment online. Hybrid PNG compression was implemented along with existing batch compression tools for further file size reduction and superior online performance.

Results

Despite an unwavering deadline combined with dangerously delayed 3D production schedules, we were able to complete and deliver the project on time. The Ram team loved the final product, which quickly garnered a noticeable increase in website traffic, visitor retention, and follow through to subsequent product pages. Their J.D. Power rating jumped to first place, and maintained good numbers throughout the limited run of the experience.