3D Automotive Deep Dive 03 - The Tooling: The Software That Runs Automotive 3D
The actual tooling stack behind automotive 3D, from CAD conversion to the file format quietly holding every trim level of every car
Back when I was on the running team, there was a guy I really liked whose name was either Craig or Greg. I missed it the first time, and by the time it mattered I had known him too long to ask. So every greeting became a small act of cowardice. “What’s up, GCraig,” except I would mumble the first consonant and let his brain do the rest. Splitting the gap. For years.
I bring this up because I still do this today, in professional meetings, with one of the most important pieces of software in the entire automotive industry. We will get there in a minute.
First, a quick recap, because this is part three of a series. We opened with an overview of how 3D shows up across automotive, from design studios to marketing to configurators. Then we covered the history of automotive design and why clay never actually left the building. Last week we walked the design process end to end, from sketch to steel, and met the color problem sitting in the middle of it.
Today we talk about the tools. And here is the part worth sitting with…you can know every DCC in entertainment, be dangerous in Maya, Houdini, and Blender, and still walk into an automotive studio and not recognize the software doing the heaviest lifting. That was me not that long ago.
It All Starts With CAD
Underneath every car is a CAD model, because a car is just a manufactured product like any other. CATIA from Dassault Systemes is the giant here, and we covered its strange fighter-jet origin story last week. If the history of CAD is a gap in your knowledge, I wrote about it a while back.
The thing to understand is that CAD data is the source of truth. Every surface on that vehicle exists to be manufactured. Hold that thought, because it is about to cause problems.
Sculpting a Car in Thin Air
Before that CAD model gets locked, though, someone has to find the shape. And this is the newest part of the stack.
We have talked about the clay studios, the full-sized sculptures, the physical review process that refuses to die. What is newer is what happens before the clay. Designers are now blocking out vehicle forms in VR, sculpting at full scale in a headset before anything gets milled or modeled. Walk into a modern automotive design studio and you will see Gravity Sketch running next to the clay bays.
Ford was the first automaker to formally adopt it, back in 2019, and the collaboration produced something better than a faster sketchpad. A designer in Dearborn and a designer in Shanghai can now stand in the same virtual studio, walk around the same full-scale model, and push its surfaces around together in real time. Ford claims early concept work that used to take weeks now takes hours.
This changes when 3D enters the process. The digital model is no longer something that happens after the design is found. Increasingly, it is how the design gets found.
The Conversion Problem
Now, back to that CAD data. CAD is NURBS-based, built for precision manufacturing. Visualization pipelines want polygons. So somewhere between engineering and every beautiful render you have ever seen sits a conversion step, and it is trickier than it sounds.
Convert carelessly and you get a greatest-hits album of broken geometry. Normals facing the wrong way. Razor-sharp edges where nothing has a bevel, because the manufacturing data never needed one. Gaps where surfaces meet, so the model is not watertight. Data that was perfect for a factory floor and useless for a render farm.
Some tools handle conversion natively now, like Keyshot or Substance 3D Stager among them, which imports STEP, IGES, JT, and even native CATIA files and tessellates them on the way in. And there is dedicated software built for exactly this job. Pixyz, which Unity acquired and recently renamed Unity Asset Transformer, though the industry still mostly says Pixyz. RapidPipeline by DGG also applies that same compression instinct to 3D data.
These tools are dramatically better than they were even a few years ago, and they keep shrinking the cleanup work. But shrinking is not eliminating. Somebody still opens that converted model in another package and fixes what the automation missed. Today, that somebody is often a 3D artist, and it is a real and employable skill.
VRED. Rhymes With Fred. Possibly.
Here is my Craig situation.
Autodesk VRED is one of the most important pieces of software in automotive visualization, and I have heard very smart people pronounce it two completely different ways. Spelled out, V-R-E-D. Or as one word, like Fred with a V bolted onto the front. I do not know which is right, and at this point I have been in too many meetings to ask. So I mumble it and split the gap, and nobody has called me on it yet.
However you say it, know what it is: VRED is roughly the Maya of automotive design. The default. The assumed skill. It is built for exactly what this industry needs… high-accuracy material rendering and real-time design review, from desktop renders to full-scale powerwall presentations to VR headsets. Autodesk keeps pushing it forward, too. Recent versions added live referencing with Alias, so surface changes appear in VRED the moment a modeler makes them, and it now runs on the Apple Vision Pro. If you are serious about automotive 3D, this software should be on your radar before almost anything else in this article.
Scanning the Real World
Last week I made the case that car paint might be the hardest color problem in any industry. The tooling answer to that problem starts with scanners.
Physical material samples, the paint chips, the leathers, the trim pieces, get captured on high-end appearance scanners. Vizoo, a German company whose xTex scanners can digitize a fabric swatch in a few minutes, handles a lot of the interior soft goods. X-Rite’s TAC7 sits at the top of the food chain, built to capture the full appearance of a material, color, gloss, texture, transparency, even the behavior of special-effect paint flakes. The output is often an AXF file, X-Rite’s vendor-neutral format for pixel-accurate representations of real-world materials, carrying deep floating point color data rather than a flattened image. I have written about AXF and why automotive leans on it before.
The scan is only the start. That data has to become clean, tileable textures, and just like in fashion, scale is everything. A leather grain scanned at the wrong scale reads as wrong to anyone who has ever sat in a car, even if they cannot tell you why. Reading and respecting the scale data in those files is quiet, unglamorous work that separates believable renders from almost-believable ones.
The Part That Finally Looks Familiar
Once the design is locked and the marketing machine spins up, the tools snap back to ones you know. The car commercial world, the dramatic mountain-road renders, the wet-pavement wheel closeups, that work happens in the traditional DCCs. The Mayas and Houdinis and Blenders of the world, feeding the render engines you already know.
Configurators are a different animal, because they have to run in real time in a browser while a customer builds their car. That world runs on real-time engines, anything from Unreal to pixel-streamed Omniverse to, in plenty of cases, Babylon.js running straight in the browser.
So if you are coming from entertainment, take the two halves seriously. Your existing toolset buys you into the marketing side. The design side speaks a different language, and learning even a little of it is what moves you from visitor to resident.
One File That Contains Every Car
The last tool in the stack is not software at all. It is a file format doing something most industries have never asked of it.
USD is usually thought of as an entertainment format, and I have covered the basics before. Automotive has pushed it somewhere new. Think about what a “car” actually is to a manufacturer. One model ships as a base version, a premium version, a luxury version, and something above that with a name like Platinum Reserve Ultimate. Each has its own trims, wheels, headlights, seats, and materials. Then multiply by region: steering wheels on the other side, different lighting regulations, different required equipment for different countries.
Automotive’s answer is USD’s variant system, taken to its logical extreme. One file per vehicle, containing every trim, every package, every regional variation inside it as switchable variants. You will hear these called 150 percent files, or super USDs, and the name comes straight from manufacturing. A 150 percent bill of materials is an old automotive concept: one master parts list containing every possible component, from which any single buildable car, the 100 percent version, can be derived. The 3D world borrowed the idea wholesale. The file contains more car than any car that will ever exist, every possible option living together in one place. One source of truth that the design team, the configurator, and the marketing pipeline can all pull from.
That is systems thinking applied to a file format, and it might be the single most instructive thing automotive has contributed to the wider 3D world.
You Do Not Need to Learn All of This Tonight
So that is the stack. CAD as the source of truth, VR sculpting upstream of it, conversion and cleanup in between, VRED at the center, scanned materials feeding it, familiar DCCs on the marketing side, real-time engines in the browser, and USD holding the whole catalog together. This is not everything in use at every company, but it is the skeleton.
Do you need to run out and learn all of it? No. Be aware of it. Know what each piece does and where it sits, because that knowledge alone changes how you read job postings and how you talk in interviews. And if this industry matches your interests, pick one piece, probably VRED or the CAD conversion workflow, and start poking at it.
Here is the thing I keep coming back to. Your software list is a map of where you have been, not a boundary on where you can go. The artists who make these industry jumps are rarely the ones who knew the whole stack in advance. They are the ones who knew it existed.
Until next time.
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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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Wow! That was a great deep look into the workings of 3D in the auto manufacturing world. Now I wonder how I could get into that somewhere?