High-quality rendering for your Web Configurator
For years, manufacturers have been competing with each other on the number of customization options available for vehicles.
The many options available for a vehicle have led to an explosion in the number of configurations available. For a vehicle like Renault Megane, there are more than ten million variants available for purchase.
A Web configurator offering 3D visuals in line with the choice of options is essential in the customer journey.
While real-time 3D technologies are more and more popular for the web, solutions based on 360° tours based on pre-calculated 3D images of vehicles remain a safe bet, given the different types of terminals used to consult the web configurator.
The number of vehicle configurations offered makes it impossible to pre-calculate the billions of 3D images required for configurators. The use of 2D masks can reduce this number, but the quality of the images is damaged and the implementation time and complexity are increased, without any margin for evolution.
This is why we have developed a software that provides the instant 3D images required for each configuration. In the case of Renault, this represents nearly one billion images calculated each year.
This technological choice leads to a simplification of the systems and their maintenance, as well as ease of updating the vehicle data, these steps being necessary for the serial life of the configurators.
On-demand 3D images
The on-demand calculation of images brings many advantages:
- The modification or addition of a vehicle is immediate: it is not necessary to pre-compute millions of images
- Only the configurations requested by the visitors are calculated
- The images are calculated with an optimal resolution for the app and the device used (PC, tablet, phone)
- The same image generator can be reused for different apps: the web configurator, a specific configurator for the launch of a vehicle, the visuals for the quote, and the presentation of the range catalog.
- In the interface, the thumbnails used to illustrate the options are calculated automatically
- The choice of cameras can be modified at any time,
- The kinematics (door opening…) are illustrated by transition videos which are also calculated on demand
- The development of a configurator is easier since it is possible to modify all the parameters of the image without having to restart expensive pre-calculation. For example, the image format (png, jpeg, wepb), its transparency (for recomposition in other software), its compression rate, its rendering mode, etc.
- The automatic instrumentation of images by key points positioned on the vehicle facilitates the attachment of specific information to an accessory in the configurator.
Regardless of the number of users simultaneously connected, it is essential to minimize loading times. The dimensioning of the 3D rendering farm and the scheduling of the calculation requests are critical and made to obtain optimal response times.
To ensure adequate service availability, we have set up two redundant computing farms hosted in data centers with automatic load balancing.
