How Embraer relies on the Chaos ecosystem to render their business jets

Embraer has a wide range of aircraft. Do you follow the same design process for each one? Or do you take a unique approach for each type of aircraft?

Our process is the same for each platform as we have to pay the highest attention to detail in our products. If we were to take any shortcuts, it would be quite evident when they are compared side by side.

What tools do you use to do your visualizations in your workflow?

We use 3ds Max, V-Ray Collection, Zbrush, Nuke, and Photoshop in our 3D workflow. 3ds Max does the heavy lifting with Zbrush supporting our soft goods modeling, such as seat inserts, blankets, and pillows. For our compositing workflow, we use Nuke. Cryptomatte support has been fantastic in allowing us to adjust any and every material in the scene. Sometimes we want to do a bit more touching up so we utilize Photoshop. 

You've recently taken advantage of shifting to V-Ray Collection. What creative doors has the license opened for your team? 

Being able to simulate smoke, fire, and water with Chaos Phoenix, while using Chaos Scans for interiors and exteriors, gives us the assurance we can accomplish any project. We relied on V-Ray Collection to create a project we call “Hollywood on Fire”. This is a futuristic concept piece that shows how Embraer will build autonomous Fyr-Flies that will help firefighters reach hard-to-access or inaccessible areas. We utilized scans for the car paints, Cosmos assets for the people, and Phoenix to sim the smoke—all coupled behind the power of V-Ray. 

Can you walk us through a project of yours that shows your workflow in Chaos Scans? 

We get customers that come in and want to customize their aircraft interior and exterior on a daily basis. The customer sits with our world-class designers and determines what colors they would like. Some go down the sporty route, others prefer elegant and classy — and sometimes they want a mix of both. When the customer and designer come to a conclusion on what they feel will look best, the project heads to the 3D team. 

We have three 3D artists and we rotate the rendering requests based on each other’s workload. The designer will provide the artist with material samples and color boards, which specify which material goes where on the aircraft. The 3D artist starts with our standard 3D interior, specific to the platform of aircraft needed to build out the beautiful interior for the customer. The artist will then determine if we have the materials in our library. If we do not, the first stop is Chaos Scans! 

Once all of the scans are applied, and our interior matches the color board, we render. We have a pretty standard neutral interior lighting rig that works well in showcasing accurate colors and texture definition, but that is also appealing to the audience. For final color grading, we utilize filmic tone mapping in the VFB and then use Nuke with Cryptomattes for our final composite.  

In turn, we can take one neutral leather scan and make hundreds of various color tones. Prior to Scans, we would take leather samples from the suppliers, scan them, tile them, then create normal, specular, and displacement maps. Some of our models are from Catia because of this and we use triplanar mapping to help out with our UV process. It’s a nice feature that triplanar mapping is built within the scan. Scans have really sped up this process.  

How important is technical accuracy when rendering aircraft scenes? What steps do you take to ensure it? 

Technical accuracy is very important for us because our clients are buying multimillion-dollar aircraft. When a customer comes in and specifies their aircraft with a custom interior, they are leaving it in our hands to bring their vision to life. When we present the final render package of their interior, they are expecting this to match the final product when they take delivery of their aircraft. 

Light Mix must be an important tool when it comes to rendering planes in flight. What settings do you find most useful?

Light Mix has proven to be very useful in our workflow. Having the ability to drastically alter the mood of the aircraft by adjusting the light’s colors and intensity. 

Sustainability has become a priority for Embraer. How do you communicate your visions and commitments visually? Can you share a recent example of a campaign you are proud of?

Sustainability is a staple of our business model and, as a company, we plan to become carbon-neutral by 2040. We aren’t stopping there though. We believe we can make our interiors sustainable as well. Conventional leather is heavily criticized for the environmental impact of the tanning process. 

Currently, we are working on creating a sustainable elements interior collection to showcase interiors that are beautiful, functional, and sustainable. The images will showcase materials with a full sustainable outlook — plant-based leathers, vegetable oil-based veneers, metals, and plating from other recycled aircraft. These four interiors are based on the four elements: water, earth, wind, and fire.