Volvo EX30 Cross Country
- CGI
- Lighting & Look Development
- Environment Design
- Art Direction
Project
A full-CGI campaign study placing the EX30 Cross Country in an ice world no crew could reach — modelled, lit and rendered in Blender.
- Client
- Self-initiated — Volvo EX30 Cross Country
- Year
- 2025
- Role
- CGI, Lighting, Environment Design, Art Direction
- Timeline
- 4 weeks
Deliverables
- Key visuals
- Detail crops
- Environment stills
- Print-ready renders
The Idea
“Rugged elegance against raw ice. No plate, no location, no crew — a car built from surfaces and a landscape built from light, both rendered in the same pass so nothing has to be faked in the composite.”
01 — Challenge
Automotive CGI has nowhere to hide. Paint, glass and chrome are the three materials an audience knows by heart, and an arctic environment adds a fourth problem: white on white, where a single wrong bounce flattens the whole image.
02 — Approach
One camera language across the series — long lens, low horizon, no dramatic angles — and one lighting rig, adjusted rather than rebuilt per shot. Snow, ice and water were modelled as real geometry so the car's contact with the ground is rendered, never painted in.
03 — Outcome
Nine campaign-grade frames of a vehicle in a location that does not exist, produced without a plate shoot, a permit or a flight — and consistent enough to run as a single visual system.
Narrative
The starting point was a single question: what does the EX30 Cross Country look like in the environment it was engineered for, before anyone has driven it there? The answer had to be built rather than photographed — a frozen coastline, a field of ice slabs, a dawn with no sun in frame.
Everything in the frame is geometry. The vehicle was surfaced panel by panel — clearcoat over metallic base, glass with correct thickness and interior visible through it, tyre rubber with real micro-roughness — because at this scale it is the surface, not the silhouette, that decides whether a render is believed.
The landscape was treated as a second product. Snow was built as displaced geometry with subsurface scattering rather than a texture, ice slabs were cut and scattered by hand so no two edges repeat, and the water plane was kept almost still so the car reads twice: once as object, once as reflection.
Lighting stayed deliberately overcast — a large, soft key with a single controlled specular running the length of the shoulder line. Every frame was rendered in Cycles and finished in Photoshop with a shared grade, so the nine images read as one shoot rather than nine experiments.
Process
- 01Concept
- 02Direction
- 03Storyboard
- 04Production
- 05Post
Credits
- CGI & Lighting
- Engram Studio
- Environment Design
- Engram Studio
- Art Direction
- Luka Todua
- Tools
- Blender · Cycles · Photoshop
Final Frame — Volvo EX30 Cross Country
CGI / Product Visualization · 2025