Spanish automotive maker Cupra recently unveiled two new models at a high-profile launch event with the help of nine virtual fashion models and their exotic digital clothing – all designed and animated by the team at Tigrelab in Barcelona.

Federico Gonzalez, CD at Tigrelab: “The client was aiming to spotlight their core values through an innovative digital catwalk. Working in tight collaboration with the brand’s design department, we embodied each of those values into a character.

“The human models were made with Reallusion’s Character Creator. We had planned to use motion capture but it was not going to be very iterative so instead we pulled from many different 3D libraries and then, cutting and pasting pieces in iClone, we gave each animation its own personality.
 

“The client was aiming to spotlight their core values through an innovative digital catwalk. Working in tight collaboration with the brand’s design department, we embodied each of those values into a character.”

 
“The characters were then exported to Marvelous Designer and the clothing was simulated taking inspiration from Cupra’s car designs and features (the bodywork, interior textile materials, the curves and concepts) extending each character’s reach with a virtual interaction with their environment.

“Everything was rendered in Unreal with many extra effects and simulations created with Cinema 4D and imported into Unreal as alembic files. The final result is an offline video, but it would have worked as real time (almost).

“The final results were displayed on a 20 x 6-meter LED mirror screen through which the audience had the illusion there were rows of people on the other side of the stage. We also enhanced the auditorium environment with a 360° projection transporting the whole venue to a new dimension.”

Watch the making-of video:

 
Client: Cupra

Agency: Vampire

Production: Tigrelab
Creative Director: Federico Gonzalez, Mathieu Felix, Javier Pinto
Project Lead: Dan Garotte
Project Manager: Camila Araujo
Unreal Lead: Antonio Nieto, Dan Garotte
Unreal Artist: Ion Romero, Pedro Veloso, Àlex Alsina
Cinema 4D Artists: Antonio Nieto, Dan Garotte, Borja Pastori, Daniel Guarin, Ion Romero
Marvelous Artists: Daniel Guarin, Jon Sánchez
Character Creation/Animator: Borja Pastori, Dan Garotte, Zhijia Wang
Compositing: Felipe Kenji Sumida
Editor: Felipe Kenji Sumida
On-site Producer: Vanesa Palmeri
On-site Filming: Formathos
Making of: Ignacio Román

Sound Design: Wesley Slover, Trevor Richardson