Unreal Engine · Pixel Streaming · Real-time · Private Client
A car configurator
that looks like cinema.
A high-end automotive visualisation tool built in Unreal Engine for a private client — combining pixel streaming for browser-based delivery, cinematic car paint shaders, and photorealistic showroom environments. Real-time, at quality, in a browser.
The project
The brief was to build a car configurator that could actually do the car justice. Not a web widget with pre-rendered image swaps — a real-time, cinematic experience that showed the vehicle at its best: paint responding to light, reflections reading correctly, the environment feeling like somewhere you'd actually want to be.
Unreal Engine was the right tool. Pixel streaming meant the experience could run in a browser without asking the customer to install anything — the heavy rendering happens server-side, the result streams to the screen. High-end hardware, everywhere, for everyone with a link.
Technical focus
Pixel Streaming
Unreal's pixel streaming stack — rendering server-side at full quality, streaming interactive video to any browser. No download, no install, no GPU requirement on the client side.
Car paint shader
Physically-based multi-layer car paint — base coat, metallic flake, clear coat — responding accurately to environment lighting and configurable in real time. Colour changes that look like colour changes, not texture swaps.
Showroom environment
A purpose-built showroom environment — controlled lighting, reflective surfaces, brand-appropriate architecture — designed to make the car look its best from every configurable angle and finish.
HDRI & atmosphere
Real-world HDRI captures feeding the environment lighting — natural sky conditions, night atmospherics, and interior ambience all contributing to physically plausible reflections and illumination.
Lumen & Nanite
Built on Unreal's latest rendering technology at the time — Lumen for fully dynamic global illumination and reflections, Nanite for virtualized geometry at cinematic detail levels.
Avatar integration
A digital human figure placed alongside the vehicle for scale and presence — grounding the car in a tangible space and reinforcing the sense of a real, visitable showroom.
Inside the engine
Atmosphere
Beyond the showroom, the configurator supported atmospheric night environments — wet asphalt, headlight scatter, volumetric fog. The kind of lighting that makes a car look like it belongs in a film rather than a brochure. HDRI captures of real night skies drove the ambient lighting, keeping the scene physically grounded even in dramatic conditions.
