Personal project

G 580 Real-Time Configurator

Most web configurators swap pre-rendered pictures: a few fixed angles of a car you can't walk around. This one renders the real G 580 live in Unreal Engine and streams it to the browser. Every option, camera move and door happens in the engine, and an assistant changes the car when you ask in plain words, so any screen can drive a film-quality car. My own project, from look development to the web app.

Industry: Automotive
Type: Real-time configurator
Role: Technical artist and developer

An assistant that cannot invent

The assistant acts only through tools checked against the live catalogue, so it cannot make up an option: "make it green with yellow calipers and open the trunk" becomes three validated commands. Every photograph here started as a frame of the configured car in the studio.

Model to real-time

The high-poly model, 23 meshes and about 5.6 million triangles, re-organised so each part can be configured on its own, and rendered live with Lumen on hardware ray tracing, ray-traced glass, MegaLights and Virtual Shadow Maps in a purpose-built studio with a light and a dark look.

Materials that hold up close

Substrate automotive paints with flake and glint, Substrate leathers and metals, and a custom detail master for the atlas-mapped parts the automotive masters could not handle: the screens, badges, buttons, carbon and wood.

Every option in the engine

Paint, wheels, calipers, bonnet, accents, trims, leather split, stitching and more live as option sets in the Variant Manager. Parts set to Body Colour follow the paint on their own, so a change of colour carries through the whole car.

A camera made for a stream

Nine camera presets with eased flights, and a damped orbit, pan and zoom rig with inertia, rebuilt because a one-to-one mouse mapping looks steppy over a video stream. Doors, bonnet and trunk open on hinges, from the interface or from the film.

Between web and engine

A Blueprint in the level reads JSON commands from the web app over the WebRTC data channel and drives the variants, the camera rig and the hinges. The assistant speaks the same commands, checked against the live catalogue, so a request in plain words becomes validated changes to the car.

The same car, anywhere

Photo mode puts the configured car into a generated photograph. Image models redraw grilles and wheels, so the pipeline captures the chosen angle, then flies the camera through four presets to build a detail sheet of the same car. The first image sets the composition; the second keeps every detail.

Directed in Sequencer

The film is a 90-second Sequencer cinematic in four chapters, cut shot by shot in the engine and rendered through Movie Render Queue. It runs on the same car and the same studio as the configurator, and hands the camera back to it without a jump.

Under the hood

With a viewer connected, the editor leaked 40 to 60 MB a second until Windows killed it at 96 GB. Measuring codec by codec traced it to the engine's hardware H.264 path, so the project forces AV1. A deadlock in the streaming layer led to a rule: the web app is optimistic, the engine never replies.

Closing thoughts

The brief I set myself was to keep it a product, not an engine viewport: the real car, lit and rendered live, that any screen can drive, and that you can simply ask for what you want.

Services: Look developmentReal-time developmentInterface designAI integrationCinematography
Tools: Unreal Engine 5.8Pixel Streaming 2Variant ManagerSequencerSubstrateReact 19TypeScriptViteClaude Agent SDKMagnific
Date: 2026

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