Summer Internship Volvo Cars

Summer Internship:

3D Graphics

Animations

Unity

Unreal Engine

Group Project

School Projects:

Personal Projects

Degree Project

Work Experience

Internship (LIA)

Volvo Cars

Softwares used: Unreal Engine, Visual Studio, Maya, Blender

Technical Artist Summer internship

During my summer internship at Volvo Cars 2023, I helped the visual content design team set up a new workflow in Unreal Engine.

Me (Ida Dahlqvist), Oliwer Lundberg and David Dahlberg created a new workflow for the team with the help from Unreal Engines current Car Configurator, where we also added the ability of a drivable car inheriting Unreal’s Chaos Vehicle function. The video to the right is showcasing the digital car in some envirormet set ups.

What have I done? What was my process?

I have mainly worked with blueprints and a little bit with c++ that's compatible with UE.

I started to create a new configurator where someone/a person (I will call this person the player) could walk around and interact with the car. After setting up a new blank project and adding some basic player functionality in blueprints I started on getting the car doors to work.

Due to the fact that the door was not rigged and animated I knew that I would want to use a timeline node in blueprint and update the doors rotation over time, and from there I started to expand the functionality and added the door to be depended on the door handle. This turned out to this blueprint node set up:

Door handle and door rotating over time with sound. This changes the relative rotation.

Open this PDF for a deeper explanation of this node set up.

Note: this is functionality is set inside a parent class, and then the doors are placed in child classes

inheriting from this and there the variables are set.

Here is how it looked like (note that the rotation points - was still not set to the exact correct location yet):

Thereafter I got asked to do the same thing but it needed to work on a control rig instead. For this I used different functions instead so it would be easier to reuse the functions for rotating other parts of the car.

Open this PDF for a explanation of how the blueprint and node set up works for rotation rigged parts.

Then the Volvos visual content team member Dominique Acevedo had a breakthrough and successfully added the EX90 car to Unreal Engines already existing car configurator from Unreals marketplace. That meant that I had to start to understand how they had set up the blueprint system and how things were depending on each other, because this configurator opened up possibilities that wouldn’t even be on the map to create during a 7 week span for us summer workers.

I created a hologram effect so the player can easily view the parts inside of the car (only some parts are displayed in this picture). I also created the blueprint and parameter collection for the animation of the car materials.

This PDF is a documentation on how the material change works and how others can use it in the future.

Here is a renderd sequence of how the material animation looks like and how the doors and etc opens.

What did I like the most about this summer internship?

First of all, it was really fun to finally be able to try out being a Technical Artist for real and not only do projects in school.

I am really thankful for this opportunity because I feel like I have found more which way I want to lean to in the Technical Artist profession. I have always had a strong passion for graphics and design, but during my time at Volvo I found that I love problem solving even more.

I have for example tried to change the chaos vehicle blueprint to C++ instead because things were relying on a Tick function (running all the time) which where way too heavy for the project.
I started to create an automatic spline/curve generation (in both unreal and blender) so a lot of time would be saved, because creating splines takes a lot of effort.