Works Zebra relies on ATI FireGL™ to keep the marketing wheels turning for auto giants.

Ever since its inception nearly twenty years ago, Works Zebra has been utilizing advanced graphics technology to design and create marketing tools that increase product appeal and optimize sales efforts. The focus of this innovative marketing services company is simple, yet effective - gather product information and identify its key selling points, organize the content to make it easy to understand, and then project the message in a visually stimulating and memorable way. And that is exactly what Works Zebra has delivered to its customers in the automotive industry. With help from Advanced Micro Devices, Works Zebra continues to find innovative new ways to deliver cutting-edge marketing techniques and sales tools that have a positive impact on car shoppers. Using advanced 3D rendering technology, Works Zebra – based in Tokyo and Los Angeles – has developed a number of tools that can efficiently produce professional-grade still graphics and printed matter, movie clips, web applications, and more.

One of Works Zebra’s flagship projects is the ZEANY e-Catalogue, an interactive presentation tool that can dynamically showcase every grade, body color and major feature of a vehicle on a wide screen display. It is designed to be used in VIP showrooms of car dealerships, and function as an effective tool for salespeople making their pitch to prospective customers.

“Our goal for the e-Catalogue project was to create a truly stunning, interactive 3D, HD-video quality presentation of vehicles using a 50-inch flat panel display controlled by a tablet PC,” says Jaja Ishibashi, Director of Business Development for Works Zebra. “We needed nothing less than photo-realistic quality at real-time rendering speeds – something that would impress viewers and drive sales.”

The beautiful, bold images projected with the ZEANY e-Catalogue attract the eye, and help to entice customers. With its interactive features, sales people can customize their presentations to the needs of each individual customer, and properly inform them of the product while providing attractive and compelling visuals.

“We obtain the CAD data and take it to 3DMAX via Rhino. From there we pass it through our real-time surfacing technology called zSurfacing to achieve per-pixel shading, then we construct our lighting and reflections through proprietary zReflections,” explains Ishibashi. “AMD was the first to offer an easy-to-develop platform for our engineers, while understanding the vast versatility of pixel and vertex shaders. For 3D-rendering capabilities, ATI FireGL’s versatile shaders make visualization possibilities endless.”

The e-Catalogue delivers razor-sharp video of interior and exterior vehicle features while allowing viewers to alter body styles, trim options and colors on-screen. Car shoppers can also see their favorite car model traversing roads in a variety of settings.

In order to deliver the exceptional production values required for the e-Catalogue, Works Zebra relied on a powerful one-two punch that combined its proprietary “Zeany” engine with ATI’s FireGL™ workstation graphics accelerators.

“The large flat panel display is powered by an ATI FireGL workstation graphics accelerator, which comes with a promise to deliver unprecedented speed and image quality - and I can tell you we were not disappointed,” says Ishibashi. “We are delivering true cinematic quality rendering of complex content along with compelling animation and visual effects. ATI graphics chips are simply the fastest on earth.”

The e-Catalogue is being used by Lexus dealers in Taiwan, Korea and Singapore after first being featured at the Seoul Motor Show. Another innovative tool from Works Zebra is ZEANY Photo, a software application that allows users to combine a 3D computer graphics model with an actual photograph, or any other background, to produce realistic composite images that can be used to create various types of media, such as print ads, websites, and catalogues.

With ZEANY Photo's real-time functionality, users can visually confirm the changes to work in progress, thereby improving production efficiency. The background, car grade, angle, body color, lighting, and reflections on the vehicle can all be changed instantaneously, along with numerous other effects. In addition to drastically cutting production times, ZEANY Photo also saves users from a number of costly expenses tied to a traditional photo shoot; such as the costs of obtaining and shipping a vehicle to a remote location, as well as other labor and equipment costs.

Both of these solutions are based on Works Zebra's proprietary 3D real time rendering engine that takes advantage of ATI FireGL's latest shader and fragment shaders. Together, AMD’s hardware power coupled with advanced 3D software that takes into account vehicle dynamics, captured landscape and environments, as well as complex camera movements, users are able to develop images and movies that are indistinguishable from actual photographs and video.

“The automotive industry is advancing at an alarming rate towards more usage of CAD-based marketing materials like our e-Catalogue and Zeany Photo. In the past, data utilization of CAD was focused on vehicle design and development, as well as performance and assembly simulations. That continues but the rate of growth of marketing tools produced using CAD is incredible,” says Ishibashi.

To fully put the system to the test, in late 2007 Works Zebra was instrumental in developing marketing materials for the launch of a new vehicle, however the vehicle was not available for location shots in Los Angeles, as the car was still being produced overseas. The end result was multiple broadcast spots, print ads, and a product brochure that were all completed with an unheard of zero actual vehicles used for compositing. It was all computer generated.

Another recent campaign example which began airing in May 2008 required a total of eight vehicles. Together with Works Zebra's Zeany technology and compositing expertise, two spots were quickly created from a combination of match-moving technology and real-time visualization.

“To complete these jobs, we have relied on the ATI FireGL hardware as the state-of-the-art reference when attempting to deliver broadcast quality effects on a GPU-based environment,” said George Barjoud, General Manager, Works Zebra USA. “In addition, given the automotive datasets that we work with are so massive, the ATI FireGL V8650 with its two gigabyte frame buffer enables us to work in real-time on these detailed scenes.”

Creating one vehicle is significant work for most CGI studios, but a total of eight cars in a single commercial raised the bar, especially when these vehicles need to be dynamically shot. Specifically aerial shots, camera car shots, cranes, and dollys, were all integrated into the sequence. The challenged increased when one of these spots was shot completely at night, requiring real-time visualization and quick post visualization turnarounds that was only possible from a real-time rendering engine.

“Works Zebra continues to push the envelope, providing cutting-edge, real-time 3D presentations based on our Zeany technology and ATI workstation graphics products,” concludes Ishibashi. “The work we do and the results we demand require the fastest graphic cards on the market. We know we can always rely on AMD for the accuracy, speed and visual quality that is crucial in delivering the results expected by our customers.”