Hydra Design Labs sent out a newsletter this week with a special sneak peek at their latest project. The Southern Californian company launched in 2010, since then working in the automotive design sector with companies such as Nissan, Mitsubishi, Chrysler and others. They recently finished a project with Northrop Grumman, a concept for a Ground Mobility Vehicle (GMV), an enhanced version of the Humvee that reduces weight, increases power, improves ground clearance and has a longer range. Their version of the GMV is nothing short of impressive. They added a lot of attitude along with it and used KeyShot for the development of all the visuals.
Northrop Grumman GMV
As you know, being able to share concept work, particularly in the car design business and even more with military vehicles, is not common. Fortunately, Northrop Grumman has allowed Hydra to share all of their work on the GMV project now featuring in the (newly relaunched) Hydra portfolio. With designing a military vehicle, there were a lot of similarities to traditional automotive design, but it also offered many unique challenges. Jon Hull, President of Hydra Design Labs, tells us more.
“One of the challenges when approaching the cg renderings of the GMV was the fact that the entire vehicle was matte finished; it can be much more difficult to make a large vehicle like that look realistic without the aid of reflections. One of the ways that we approached this challenge was to make an incredible amount of detail on the model.”
Detail is key, but more detail, means more geometry. That’s where KeyShot delivered. “KeyShot allowed us to bring in MASSIVE amounts of data and still kept cranking along. We modeled everything down to the smallest detail (including all hooks and tie down straps) and also imported full engineering data of the chassis. Any other software would have choked on the sheer size of the data which at one point was up to 8GB. For one scene we even modeled an entire full-size airplane hangar which ended up having over 250 lights in the ceiling with the full vehicle model sitting right in the middle of it. That even impressed us and we’ve been using KeyShot since it came out.”
Here are some more shots from the project. Be sure to stop by their website, sign up for their newsletter and prepare for more great things coming from Hydra Design Labs. They will be launching a new site soon, Hydra101.com, an Automotive Design Store and Learning Annex where the designers of Hydra will be offering Automotive Design related software and tutorial videos.
