This vehicle could be the car you need it to be... in the ads

The car you see in commercials is always the most eye-catching, the most elegant and the most brilliant. And that is only natural, because it is the car they want you to buy. So they go to great lengths to give it a magical touch, making it look like the best and most attractive, the one that must be in your garage. But that marvellous, dazzling car has a trick, one we are going to tell you about and that will make you look at it with different eyes.

In most cases, the car you see racing in an advert may not exist, being a CGI-generated car, mounted on a vehicle used as a base to create the impression the client is after. A electric car driven by a driver who is the latest trend when it comes to automotive commercials.

A chameleon that can impersonate any model

Blackbird is the name of this vehicle, which has several moving and adjustable parts that allow it to adopt the wheel track, length and width of almost any car. This makes it the ideal base on which to mount the image of the car to be reproduced and, with the magic of digital effects, it looks completely identical to the real vehicle. Once the post-production assembly is done, it is impossible to tell it apart from a real one.

Blackbird’s characteristics can be modified to simulate any model, whose bodywork will be added later in post-productionThe process is as follows. The Blackbird is adjusted to clone in detail the characteristics of the car it is going to stand in for. This means the necessary adjustments are made so that it measures and behaves exactly as that car is expected to. Its characteristics match the car in question exactly, even though it is the same test vehicle. The rims and wheels are fitted with the ones that correspond to the car, to offer greater fidelity.

Thanks to all these modifications, both the wheels and the shadow the car casts are adjusted to the size the car is supposed to have. All that remains is for the special effects technicians to dress the body of this vehicle with the chosen skin, and nobody will be able to say it is a computer invention.

The advantage of this system is that an advert can be made for a car that is not yet operational. If any change is made to the design, it can be replaced without too many problems and the image can be reconditioned so that it resembles the production vehicle. Anyway, there is a small trick to tell whether the advert shows the real car or a CGI design. Have you seen the caption “The final design may differ from that shown“? Well, there you have it.

The Blackbird can also be used to replace cars in films and series, so we have probably already seen it in some blockbuster without noticing. Our dream car may, for now, be just a lovely fantasy. But isn’t it a very useful technology?

Via | Gizmag