3D Automotive Deep Dive 01: A Brief History of Cars, Configurators, and Car Ads
How 3D quietly took over three completely different jobs in the automotive industry, and never fully finished the takeover
I told you my partner and I were replacing our car in the Start Here article of this deep dive series.
We are doing the whole modern thing this time. Watching the YouTube reviews for every car we are considering. Building it out on the manufacturer’s online configurator, picking the model, the color, and definitely adding that roof rack for the surfboard that I will definitely buy because I’m about to definitely bout to get really good at surfing.
And, of course, I still need to do a quick checkin that my partner is still not cool with us just getting a golf cart instead.
Side note. One of the more surprising things about becoming a middle-aged man is how much time I now spend thinking about why more people don’t just own golf carts. It is the perfect vehicle. Have you ever been sad while driving a golf cart? I sure haven’t. Put me in a golf cart, no door, leg dangling out the side, gas pedal all the way to the floor going 14 mph, and something in me just settles. This world would be a better place if more people drove golf carts around.
Okay. Back to the story of how I am using my computer to buy a car.
We did more of this digitally than any car purchase I have made before. But we did not skip the dealership entirely. We ended up standing in a showroom anyway, signing paperwork, because at some point a human being still has to hand you a key.
That small detail turns out to be the whole story of 3D in automotive. Digital keeps replacing more and more of the process without ever replacing it completely. It keeps eating a little more of the job every decade, and it still has not finished.
There are three places this has played out. How cars get designed. How cars get sold. How cars get advertised. Each one has its own history, and each one follows the exact same pattern. Let’s go through all three.
The Car Before the Car Exists
For most of automotive history, a car’s shape was decided by hand, in clay, at full scale. Sculptors worked in teams, running their palms along a fender to feel a crease the eye might miss. This was not a placeholder step before “the real design.” It was the design.
The first serious crack in that process came out of Renault in the late 1960s. An engineer named Pierre Bézier had spent years developing a mathematical way to describe complex curves using a handful of control points. In 1968 that math became a working piece of software called UNISURF, and it did something no one had done before: it let a designer describe a car’s surface with numbers instead of a knife. Peugeot, which had an R&D relationship with Renault, used UNISURF to design the complete body of its 204 that same year.
Bézier curves are still one of the first things anyone learns in 3D today, and most artists using them have no idea they came from a Renault design studio trying to solve a car problem.
The tools that followed moved fast. Alias Research was founded in Toronto in 1983 and shipped its first software two years later. What eventually became Alias StudioTools turned into the industry standard for Class A surfacing, the extremely precise NURBS-based modeling that defines the outer skin of a vehicle. Dassault’s CATIA followed a similar path from aerospace into automotive engineering. By the 1990s, a car existed as a fully realized digital model long before anyone touched metal.
At that point, the industry made a prediction that turned out to be wrong. Executives talked seriously about the “clayless studio,” a future where physical sculpture disappeared entirely and every review happened on a screen. It did not happen. Clay is still in every major design studio today, sitting next to a rack of VR headsets and Gravity Sketch licenses, because there is something about standing next to a full-size object that a monitor still cannot replicate. Digital handles speed and iteration. Clay handles the moment someone has to trust their eyes completely. Sixty years after Bézier, the two still take turns.
Selling the Car Before It Exists
The traditional way to buy a car required a lot in the way of geography and patience. You drove to a lot. You talked to a person whose job was to sell you the car in front of you, not the one you actually wanted. If you wanted a different color or trim, you waited, sometimes for months.
The earliest attempts to change that started showing up around the mid-1990s, right as the web itself was becoming a retail channel. Small studios began experimenting with real-time 3D specifically to let manufacturers show a vehicle in more than one configuration without a warehouse full of trim variants sitting on a lot. It was clunky by today’s standards. Slow to load, low on polygons, closer to a spinning product shot than an experience. But the idea underneath it was already correct: let the customer build the car before the car exists.
That idea took two full decades to mature. Manufacturer configurators through the 2000s were mostly static image swaps, a new photo loading every time you changed a color. The shift to actual real-time 3D, the kind running on the same engines that power video games, happened much more recently, as browsers got fast enough and rendering pipelines got portable enough to put a fully lit, physically accurate car in a browser tab. Today a configurator is a legitimate 3D production, not a marketing afterthought. Every paint finish has to read correctly under changing light. Every material has to hold up to a customer rotating the model and zooming into the stitching.
Here is the part that would have surprised the people building those early-90s prototypes. Even with all of that, dealerships did not disappear. The research moved online almost entirely. The final decision, in a lot of cases, still involves a physical building, a test drive, and a human conversation. Digital took over discovery and decision-making. It has not taken over closing.
Marketing the Car That May Not Physically Exist
For most of the twentieth century, car advertising was a photography discipline, and a genuinely difficult one. Studio shoots for a single hero image could take days, with a physical car, physical lighting rigs, and a crew built entirely around getting one perfect reflection down a door panel.
CGI entered automotive marketing quietly, and not through advertising at all. It showed up first inside the industry, in the same design and engineering visualization pipelines from the section above. Those same photoreal renders used to review a dashboard internally were, technically, already advertising-quality images. It did not take long for marketing departments to notice they were sitting on assets they had already paid for.
The moment that made the shift undeniable arrived in 2016, when the visual effects studio The Mill unveiled something called the Blackbird. It is a fully adjustable, electrically driven car rig with no fixed body at all, built to be filmed on a real road, under real light, and then digitally transformed in post into literally any car the client wants. The commercial you saw of a car drifting through a canyon at sunset may have had a real driver, a real road, and zero percent real car. That is not a stunt anymore. That is a standard tool in automotive advertising.
The honest answer to “how much of what I see in car ads is CGI” is more than most people assume, and the industry is not especially eager to advertise the number. What used to be a photography problem is now, for a large share of campaigns, a lighting and material accuracy problem solved entirely in a render engine. The bar for realism did not go down when the camera disappeared. It went up, because now there is no excuse for the paint to look wrong.
The Thread Running Through All Three
Look at what actually happened across design, sales, and marketing. In every single case, a digital version of the car started doing a job that used to require the physical object to exist. Reviewing a shape. Making a purchase decision. Selling a feeling. And in every single case, the physical version refused to fully step aside.
Digital did not need to win completely to change everything. It only needed to take over enough of the job for the remaining physical piece to become the exception rather than the rule. Clay went from being the entire design process to being the final gut check. The dealership went from being the whole transaction to being the last five minutes of it. The camera went from capturing every car in every ad to capturing the handful that still need to be real.
So you don’t need to pack away your inflatable dancing floppy dudes entirely automotive industry… because people will still need to do some things in the physical space.
For a 3D artist walking into automotive today, that gap is the opportunity. You are not being hired to finish the job digital started. You are being hired to work in the space that never fully closed, the place where a render has to be good enough to make a shape, a decision, or a feeling stick without the real thing in the room.
What’s Next
Next time in this series, we go back inside the design story and slow it down. How a vehicle actually moves from a sketch to a finished digital surface to an approved design, who touches it at each stage, and exactly where a 3D artist fits into that chain. The history explains why the industry looks this way. The next piece explains how to actually work in it.
See you then.
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Hello! Michael Tanzillo here. I am the Head of Technical Artists with the Substance 3D team at Adobe. Previously, I was a Senior Artist on animated films at Blue Sky Studios/Disney with credits including three Ice Age movies, two Rios, Peanuts, Ferdinand, Spies in Disguise, and Epic.
In addition to his work as an artist, I am the Co-Author of the book Lighting for Animation: The Visual Art of Storytelling and the Co-Founder of The Academy of Animated Art, an online school that has helped hundreds of artists around the world begin careers in Animation, Visual Effects, and Digital Imaging. I also created The 3D Artist Community on Skool and this newsletter.
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